In which we interrupt our regular content to venture into sports journalism:

I experienced a new slice of Portland life last evening: attendance at a Portland Timbers FC match. It was the last home game of the season for our local minor-league footballers, and they drew a record-breaking crowd. The 15,000+ spectators (and several hundred additional fans, every bit as enthusiastic as the ticket-holders, lining the street that overlooks the park) don’t sound too impressive until you’ve been among them. Unbeknownst to most Portlanders, there are soccer-mad citizens among us who could do themselves proud in England, Italy, or Brazil. They call themselves the Timbers Army, and stadium management graciously allows them to bring in enormous flags on eight-foot poles, drums, trumpets, cowbells, inflatable dolphins, streamers, and green smoke bombs. They never sit down during the match, and neither do they shut up. For the 90 minutes of the game, plus the warm-up, half time, and a good fifteen minutes after the victory, they were in constant song, chant, and heckle. Their ditties range from the title of this post, accompanied by manic hand-clapping, to the merciless “There’s no pity in the Rose City!” for fallen opponents and the jingling of car keys and lusty chorus of “Go home, you bums, go home”, to the derisory “Helen Keller” chant (“I’m blind! I’m deaf! I wanna be a ref!”), to this downright bizarre adaptation of a popular Christmas song:

Gone away is the quiet
Over here is a riot
Just walkin’ along, singin’ our song,
Walkin’ in a Timbers wonderland.

The maestro of the whole performance is the team mascot. Timber Jim is not an overstuffed bobble-head cartoon lumberjack trotting about waving an inflatable ax, as you might expect. Timber Jim is a burly 60-year-old powerful enough to stomp around the edge of the pitch brandishing and revving an enormous chain saw over his head (Shindaiwa is one of the team’s sponsors) and to scale the 80′ tree trunk that flies the Timbers flag, but nimble enough to stick back-flips and rappel from the stadium ceiling with his saw and drum. When the team scores, Timber Jim buzzes off a 2″-thick slab of his gigantic log, which is trundled out on a wagon before each match, and presents it to the man with the golden foot. One fellow scored a hat trick earlier in the season and could barely stagger off the field with his three trophies. The Army harbors a fierce love and idolatry of Timber Jim: they wear scarves bearing his name and he has several of his own chants and songs, including a tender bellowing of “You Are My Sunshine” in memory of his teenage daughter who died in a car wreck. They are a clan, the Timbers fans, and Timber Jim is their patriarch.

Shouting and cheering in the midst of this raucous crew, I couldn’t help thinking back to my days as a student of anthropology. I read a very interesting book that came out of fieldwork among the “hooligan” soccer fans in England, but you have to get down among the sweaty, beer-drenched, exultant masses to appreciate what an outlet for camaraderie and devotion the stadium can be. It’s spoken of in baseball, particularly (in my experience) in Fenway Park, but I’ve rarely seen it sustained so electrically for so long. Soccer doesn’t offer the deliberate, structured pauses of baseball: everyone is in motion every minute of a well-played game, and a second or two of brilliant or lax play can change the tide at any point. And unlike many of the more popular American sports, it’s better viewed in person than on television with extensive commentating. There’s little need for instant replay; the ball is large and easy to see at all times; the fans can truly appreciate how hard the players are working as they sprint up and down that big field with no clock stoppages for 45 minutes. Stats don’t matter; fitness and vision and innovative connection with other players do. That’s what I like to see in all the sports I watch, so I may have to make Timbers games a regular part of my summer schedule next year. I can probably even employ my knitting skills to improve on those acrylic scarves. It shouldn’t be hard to work up an intarsia chart for NO PITY, right?

I try to keep this blog about the knitting, but sometimes the rest of life intrudes, in good ways and in not so good ways, and often in the two bound up inextricably. You see, Mr. G. is starting his own company, and has been pouring his soul and sanity and most of his waking hours and even many of his sleeping hours into the project since January. It’s a worthy business, designed to help people manage diabetes, because Mr. G has a lot of personal experience with the toll this disease can take and because he is the kind of person who always does what he can to make life better for others. The site won’t launch for another six weeks or so and he’s toiling away even as I type, but we needed a break. There was a lull in my schedule, so we packed up and went to the beach for a few days.

We took books and knitting and Mingus the cat. Now that we’ve turned the last page of Harry Potter, we needed something else to read together, and I proposed Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which Mr. G has never read. We made it all the way through The Golden Compass at the beach, tucking the paperback into a coat pocket (it’s always cold at the beach in Oregon) or my knitting bag to read in the coffee shop, while waiting for tables at restaurants, and during breathers on a beautiful hike. Mr. G is hooked and can often be heard to mutter threats at Mrs. Coulter even when we’re not reading.

I also cozied up with Elizabeth Zimmermann’s The Opinionated Knitter and particularly savored her journal entries about camping with the Old Man and KLINE the cat. KLINE, it turns out, was a much better traveler than Mingus. Poor Gus was spectacularly carsick coming and going, and if I’d taken any pictures of his miserable little face, ears at half mast, eyes pleading, drooling gobbets of slime by the pint as he clung to the bars of his traveling cage, I’d have PETA leaving bags of flaming poo on my doorstep. He loved galloping from one end of the beach house to the other and teetering along the ceiling beams, he thoroughly approved of the beds, and he was very content to be in our company, but I’m not sure the journey was worth it.

The car time aside, it was a perfect vacation. We saw a whole raft of harbor seals basking on the beach, elk tracks in the forest, rare butterflies, raptors, gulls galore, and all kinds of resplendent nature.  Our six-mile hike along Cascade Head, down through the Nature Conservancy land and back up again, was gorgeous (see links for pictures) — beautiful views of the dramatic coastline and back inland over the estuary to the misty hills. We watched movies — The Bourne Ultimatum on the big screen (sadly lacking in tasty villains… must rewatch Bourne the Second to salivate over Karl Urban) and the BBC miniseries Wives & Daughters, which I recommend to fans of Austen, The Forsyte Saga, et al., on the laptop DVD. I worked on an EZ February baby sweater for a little girl who’s supposed to arrive tomorrow, and finished the second sleeve of the Frost Flowers pullover.

Now it’s back to work, proofreading a manuscript, and then the family arrives on Friday. We’re having a party to celebrate my little brother’s engagement and his 25th birthday. Yep, I’m getting a new sister next May 24! And I couldn’t have picked a better one myself. She’s a knitter, too, and she’s already asked me to knit her a stole to wear on the big day, so we’ll be talking yarns and patterns this weekend. The wedding colors are lavender and green, so I’m hoping I can knit the stole in one of those rather than in white (how many white wedding stoles should a person really knit in one lifetime? At least two, I guess, if that’s what she wants…). If you’ve got suggestions for patterns, leave ’em in the comments. I want to hear your wedding handknits experiences and cautionary tales.

I’m happy to report that two-year anniversaries are just as nice as one-year anniversaries. Last year we spent June 18 at Mr. G’s parents’ beach house. It was kind of grey and drizzly for June, and the coast tends to sock in with fog, but that just made for more cozy indoor snuggling. This year we went upscale. We traipsed out the Columbia Gorge, and the weather turned beautiful. It’s hard to top the Gorge for scenic splendor:

Here’s the hubby’s two-years-of-wedlock portrait. He looks miserable, right?

…and mine…

(Pssst… that’s my newly sewn skirt. I heart Amy Butler fabrics. My attraction made all kinds of sense when I realized she works for Rowan.) We took the old Columbia Gorge Highway, a twisty little two-lane road built in the early 1900s that clings to the skirts of the cliff. The modern I-84 runs just below (all the way to Boston), and it’s about as pretty a trip as you can make on an interstate, but the historic road has more charm and spins you right past the feet of numerous waterfalls and grandpappy conifers.

Here’s where we were going:

Nothing like a little old-fashioned romance in a 1920s hotel above the river. There was strolling in the gardens, watching the cliff swallows wheel and dart over the waterfall, a vodka gimlet at the bar before supper (for me; abstemious Mr. Garter had iced tea), dressing for dinner (the wedding stole made an appearance), a slow dance on the lawn under the stars (we needed a little gentle exercise after the endless dinner courses), the bed turned down with a rose and tasty little cakes on the bedside tables… in short, the works. Next year we’ll probably go camp out in the wilderness for contrast, but it was fun to treat ourselves this once.

The next morning we took a little spin up out of the Gorge and into the surrounding farmland before we had to mosey back to the city. The views are just as marvelous when you’re not looking at the river, it turns out:

For those of you who haven’t been to Oregon yet, this is Mt. Hood. You can see her from lots of places in Portland, but not quite this close and personal. Hood is only 11,289 feet high — nothing to many of the Rockies; a footstool beside the Himalayas — but because of the way she rears up out of the hills alone, she’s absolutely majestic. This mountain always makes me think of the ancient Greeks and their gods on Olympus. If we have local gods, I suspect they call this peak home.

Back in Stumptown, I scampered off to meet my girl Katrin for an afternoon of window shopping and manicures, partly to make up for the way we botched her birthday over the weekend and partly just because it was a Tuesday and it happened that neither of us had to work. I believe this was our first outing that didn’t involve knitting — we realized too late that we could have been wielding the needles whilst we soaked our feet in the pedicure spa, alas. I have got a little knitting to show you, but this post runneth over and needeth no more pictures. I’ll save it for tomorrow or Sunday. Happy Summer, everybody. The Farmer’s Almanac would like to offer you this advice for your weekend: Grate potatoes and apply to sunburned skin. The starch will cool and soothe the burn. They’d also like you to know that tomorrow is the best day to cut hair to encourage growth.

After exactly three weeks, our furry little adventurer is home. He’s safe and sound, but for a couple of little abscesses and 15% of his body weight. A kind soul who lives more than a mile away saw our poster in a coffee shop and realized this was the cat who’d been hanging around his place, demanding lap time on the front porch and fighting with his own cat. I was away at an educational symposium all morning with the car; Mr. Garter leapt onto his bicycle and pedaled up there, and this fellow had our kitty in his arms in the driveway. He passed Mingus over, and the little booger hissed, realized who Mr. G was, and started purring like mad. The neighbor was kind enough to lend his cat carrier and chauffeur Mingus back to our doorstep.

Thanks to each one of you for your prayers and good wishes to us and our errant kitty, and for all your little kindnesses to strangers. As much as the news might make you think otherwise, the world is full of good people helping one another, and that makes it a beautiful place. Especially right now.