When the Almond Tree Blooms

Fog and Seastack, Olympic National Park, Washington Coast Pelicans near mouth of Hoh River, Oil City, Washington Rounding a headland north of Oil City Recently, I read an excellent book, Ivan Doig's "The Sea Runners". It's a sort of historical fiction, following four indentured servants who escape from the Russian outpost of New Archangel (now Sitka, Alaska) in a canoe and travel down the coast towards Astoria, Oregon. Doig tells the story wonderfully, making it difficult to put the book down, and bringing the perils that the four men face to life. The book also invokes the Pacific coastline of the northwest, a place I love and know well. For most of my childhood, we went camping out on the beach on the Washington Coast in Olympic National Park. We played on the sand, roasted hot dogs and tried to keep raccoons and bears away from our food. We also endured hailstorms in July, caught a glimpse a rare gray whale breaching right off a rocky point, and dodged wav

Central Park At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not the aquarium H and H Bagels, Manhattan Under the 7 Line, Roosevelt Ave, Jackson Heights View from Morningside Park across Harlem towards midtown. Last week was my first time in New York City. The place overwhelmed me with its' towering buildings, masses of people and richness of cultural attractions. As the arguable center of capitalism, the NYC is full of the contradictions of globalization. In Manhattan, some of the richest people in the world live in some of the most expensively priced real estate and shop at some of the most expensive stores, while service workers toil away at minimum wage jobs. If they are lucky, the working class in NYC can receive some sort of subsidized housing or rent control, if not, I have no idea how anyone on anything less than a moderate income ($50,000 or s0) can afford housing there. The widening gap between rich and poor seems to be one of global capitalism's most dismal failures. But