Lake Forest: two views of the north

I believe I have written this here before, but it was a while ago and readers come and go and forget, so forgive me if you recognize repetition.

I lived in the San Francisco Bay area in 1966-67 in an apartment in Oakland near Lake Merritt.  I bought my first boat then and taught myself to sail on San Francisco Bay.

That was a special year there.  Of flower children.  Of Haight Ashbury.  Of drugs and rock and roll.  If you really understand me you know I was not a part of any of those; but there was a unique and quickly vanishing feeling in the city that year of kindness and peace.

The woman who was then a part of my life, with whom I lived off and on for longer than anyone until Carol and with whom I woke one morning in Lake Tahoe intending to drive to Reno to get married, but didn’t, and I often drove across the Bay Bridge and rented bicycles in the Haight Asbury to ride through Golden Gate Park.

There were then buffalo in an enclosure in the park, great shaggy beasts who came to the fence and gently took slices of bread with their thick pebbly black tongues from our hands. I sensed that they were confused being there, but maybe I was only projecting my own feelings.

At the west end of the park, just short of the Pacific Ocean, was a replica Dutch windmill and a wood ship about 70’ long sitting in a sand pit.

This is not exactly the way I remember it, but the best photo I can find online.  I expect it was taken before the ship and her voyage had been mostly forgotten.

The ship was the GJOA in which Roald Amundsen completed with if I remember correctly five shipmates the first crossing of the Northwest Passage in 1906.  There was no marker beside the ship when we saw her and I had to ask many people before I learned who she was. You may during your lives have observed that more people are oblivious than curious.

I read of Amundsen and admire him greatly, but I have never been tempted to try the Northwest Passage.  Not because it is cold, but because it is all coastal and I am a creature of the open ocean.

The top image comes from today;s NASA Earth Observatory site.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148802/ice-persists-in-the-northwest-passage

It shows that even with global warming, this year ice is blocking the passage.  Amundsen went north of Somerset Island and east and then south of King William Island and was frozen in to what is now known as Gjoa Harbor near the southeast corner of the island.  The GJOA took three years to cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The second image shows among others the projected track of Hurricane Larry.  I have a friend named Larry who considerately agreed to stay offshore, but he is heading eventually toward Greenland and Iceland.  

As you may know I have been observing the weather around Iceland for quite some time.  The temperatures are least uncomfortable in July and August.  I think I can get there without encountering ice during those months.  With hurricane tracks like Larry’s I don’t know if I can get back.