Backpackpacking Cascade Canyon in the Tetons

On a day hike up Cascade Canyon four years ago, we started thinking in the late afternoon about how it would be to not have to turn around and go back--to stay and camp in Cascade’s North Fork. The good luck of not too much smoke, a sunny forecast, and snagging a last-minute Park Service camping permit for exactly that North Fork camping zone lured us into the backcountry. 

 

We should have trained for carrying 35-pound packs up 7 ½ miles and 1,500 feet of elevation, but, really, though hard, it was beautiful--a sandy flat place with a view to stake out the tent, a distant flash of a black bear in the still-green willows across the creek, a dusky gold glow on the old granite of Mount Owen and the Grand, and the Milky Way flowing above the canyon ridge-to-ridge at night. 

And it was also beautiful to return to Gros Ventre Campgound afterward. A few days without them make tables, benches, sinks, water that doesn’t need to be filtered, and toilets seem more lovely than they were before, but, then, a few days feeling the camaraderie of the trail--almost everyone smiles--makes the unsmiling distance between people in Jackson stand out, and Jackson was still very crowded in the week after Labor Day. Another thing we found: we can still do this--barely.

Moose near the Gros Ventre Campground

Edinburrowing

Wondering Which of Bibi's Bakery's Cupcakes to Buy

Edinburrians? Edinburrowers? We're not sure what to call the people of Edinburgh. Given that they pronounce the city's name Edinbuhruh or Edinbruh, Edinburghers can't be right. Whatever we call them, people have been Edinburrowing for centuries--governing, buying and selling, teaching and learning, dealing with outlanders like us, and having fun.

Eric and Bill Baber, Who Knit Donna's New Sweater

John MacEwan and Paul Lightfoot, Hosts at 94 DR

Over two weeks, we did cross paths with one cranky bus driver and a very impatient taxi driver; otherwise, good humor seems to flow happily from person to person in this city. You have to smile when you walk into Pizza Posto where the staff t-shirts say "Pizza is the answer. I forgot the question." Walking through The Meadows, we heard more Edinburrian humor when the sun came out and a woman held out her hands and said: "What is this stuff? Ohhh--it's sunshine!" These people do not live up to their dour reputation.

Enjoying Princes Street Gardens During a Rare Solar Event--Sunshine

Playing Basketball with a Soccer Ball at Inverleith Park

Serving Paella at the Stockbridge Market

Edinburrowing at the National Museum

Resting in the National Mueum

Eric after Grazing on Grassmarket

Even when you can't see the people of Edinburgh in action, you still see signs of what they are or have been up to. The monument to Wojtek in the Princes Street Gardens is dark bronze, but the bear-sculpture's nose and ears shine golden from being caressed and polished by many hands. Polish soldiers adopted the young bear during World War II and enlisted him. The story is that he carried crates of ammunition to the front lines at the Battle of Monte Cassino. After the war, many Polish soldiers moved to Scotland, and he did, too. Now he's an appealing monument to touch.

Monument to Wojtek in the Princes Street Gardens

Edinburrowers over time also have left their mark in layers of paint on the sides of buildings, 

 

and you can see signs of their spirit on restaurant chalkboards, in posters,

and midgie earrings at the Stockbridge Market celebrating the ubiquitous Scottish biting insect. 

Edinburrians tap 'er light.

Edinburgh: Old and New

West End of Edinburgh Castle

The oldest parts of Old Town Edinburgh--the stone castle, abbey, kirks, commercial and municipal buildings, residences, streets, closes, and wynds--are medieval, some from the 12th century, built on top of old, high, defensible, volcanic rock scraped by glaciers. 

A Close off High Street

A Close off Grassmarket

This stony site itself was an eminently defensible place, and the closes and wynds that people built there were part of Edinburgh's defenses: closes are private alleyways, many closable with gates, and wynds are very narrow passageways between buildings--sometimes just stairways--heading up to or diving down from the road running the length of Old Town's stone spine foundation; they created places to hold off from above narrowed streams of attackers. 
 


The Scotsman Steps, in the tradition of wynds but not built until 1899, are considered a thoroughfare by the city; they connect North Bridge up in Old Town with Waverley Station on Market Street in New Town below it. They were transformed into a work of art by Martin Creed in 2011: each of the 104 steps is a beautiful, different kind of marble.   

Neoclassical New Town

Even New Town Edinburgh is old, with work on it begun in 1767, during the reign of King George III, and its buildings imitate architectural styles--classical and gothic--that are older yet. In among New Town's prevalent neoclassical Georgian row houses, one of its most prominent buildings, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, built in 1889, is neo-gothic.

Neo-gothic New Town: The Pageant Frieze of Scottish Historical Portraits

Crow-Stepped Gable in Old Town

Miralles's Upside-Down Crow Steps at New Scottish Parliament

There's more mixing of old and new; one of the newest buildings in Edinburgh has echoes of the oldest. Architect Enric Miralles, for the Scottish Parliament Buildings, used upside-down crow-steps as a design element in the office window alcoves for members of the Scottish Parliament.


And the 1998 addition to the 1866 National Museum of Scotland has a castle-like round stone tower.

Dean Village

Garden Gate in Dean Village

Dean Village, founded with its mills on the river called the Water of Leith in the 12th century and now a part of the city, has strikingly new elements. 

And at the east end of Old Town, newer parts have been added onto older buildings, like the 16^th-and-17^th-century Palace of Holyroodhouse built onto the 12^th-century Holyrood Abbey.

Holyroodhouse and Holyrood Abbey from Salisbury Crags

Golden Boy and Dome on the University of Edinburgh's Old College

To see more adding of the newer onto the older, you can look east from the roof of the National Museum and see the dome and the gilt figure that represents youth carrying the torch of knowledge. The dome and figure were added a hundred years after the construction of the University of Edinburgh’s Old College, originally called the New College because it replaced older-yet buildings. 

Stone Sphinx on the Roof on Supreme Courts of Scotland

Stone Sphinxes on the Roof of the National Gallery of Scotland

The city is stacked and piled with old stone buildings with slate roofs and stone spires and statues on top, with stone streets, closes, wynds, and walks between them.

Queen Victoria on the Roof of the Royal Scottish Academy

 

Cathedral of St. Giles, the High Kirk

Looking at photographs of the stone of Edinburgh can easily lead to a sense that the city is stony or hardened, grey or dismal. It isn't. Walking through and on all of that old stone brings constant reminders that we're just the most recent among those who have been glad to be here.

Stone in the Walkway through Makar's Court of Lady Stair's Close

Next Post: People in Edinburgh

Edinburgh: “By leaves we live”

Statue of Sir Walter Scott at the Foot of Waverley Monument

Waverley Monument to Sir Walter Scott at St. David and Princes Street

  




Pages in books, trees in parks--Edinburgh cherishes both kinds of leaves. Monuments to writers, museums devoted to writing and writers, quoted words carved in stone--writers sprout all over the city, as do leaves in trees, parks, and gardens.

Salisbury Crags a Short Walk from Old Town Edinburgh

Laburnum Trailing into the Water of Leith in the Heart of Dean Village

The Scottish Poetry Library has adopted Patrick Geddes’s words “By leaves we live” as their motto, and the city has, too.

Dean Village and the Water of Leith

 



Geddes (1854-1932) was a philosopher, sociologist, geographer, historian, botanist, zoologist, scholar of poetics, and urban planner, and the four words "By leaves we live" come from this part of his 1918 farewell lecture to his students at University College Dundee, where he was Chair of Botany: 

"How many people think twice about a leaf? Yet the leaf is the chief product and phenomenon of Life: this is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent on the leaves. 

Students Grilling to Celebrate the End of the Academic Year in The Meadows

"By leaves we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of coins. But the world is mainly a vast leaf-colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests."

"Poetree" at the Scottish Poetry Library

 





In Edinburgh, in 2011, a wonderful commingling of books’ and trees’ leaves occurred at the Scottish Poetry Library. The first anonymous gift of an altered-book sculpture appeared there. 

The sculptor, in a note attached to the gift, said, "We know that a library is so much more than a building full of books… a book is so much more than pages full of words… This is for you in support of libraries, books, words, ideas…" Inside the gilded eggshell at the foot of the "Poetree" is a poem by Edwin Morgan. 

Book Sculpture at the Writers' Museum

The first 11 sculptures appeared in 2011, and more have since, including the one in the Writers' Museum made from Ian Rankin's Hide and Seek.

More leaves of books and trees: for the summer of 2018, the Royal Botanic Garden is exhibiting the original art by Jackie Morris for Lost Words, the book of poems by Robert Macfarlane responding to the choice of the editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary to remove a number of words related to the natural world and replace them with words related to computers. The poem, or spell, as Macfarlane calls it, for the removed word acorn, printed on the wall beside the painting is: 

"As flake is to blizzard, as

Curve is to sphere, as knot is to net, as

One is to many, as coin is to money, as

    bird is to flock, as

Rock is to mountain, as drop is to fountain, as

    spring is to river, as glint is to glitter, as

Near is to far, as wind is to weather, as

    feather is to flight, as light is to star, as

    kindness is to good, so acorn is to wood."

Fortunately, people in Edinburgh, have both such open and leafy places as the Royal Botanic Garden, the Water of Leith pathway, Holyrood Park, and the Meadows, as well as reminders of Scotland's great writers carved in paving stones and printed on the walls inside the Parliament Building.

Electronic Counter for Cyclists Passing through The Meadows

 

 

Next: Old and New in Edinburgh

"Old Smoky [Edinburgh]: Best of All the Towns" Robert Fergusson 1750-1774