cyclotram

Hey, it's the new thing. (If the embedded version doesn't play in your browser, try the original here.)

A short video clip of the "Halo" water feature inside the Crystals mall in Las Vegas. A CityCenter press release describes it thusly:

Halo materializes as a series of water vortices held captive within clear cylinders that thrust up through the floor. Sloped, as though about to fall, the swirling water appears caught in constant struggle to right itself with its inherent sense of verticality. These swirls of color serve as a main focal point of the atrium. In between stops at Louis Vuitton and Gucci, guests and visitors are free to walk through and touch or embrace this maze of spinning water while staying completely dry. WET’s elemental features at CityCenter set the spirit for the sophisticated experience that visitors to this unprecedented destination will enjoy.

WET Design, the firm behind all of the CityCenter water widgets, has this to say about it:

WET's cutting-edge creations help to reveal a world of fascination and wonder at every turn at CityCenter in Las Vegas. The water designs play an integral role in producing an immediate feeling of elegance and surprise throughout the grounds. Crystals, the stunning retail and entertainment district, designed by architects Studio Daniel Libeskind and Rockwell Group, houses Glacia and Halo, two cutting-edge features that exist in pure harmony with one another. The unexpected nature of Halo's twisting water vortices, tipped as though about to fall, enlivens Crystals' shopping experience and presents a sense of mystique for guests wandering among the lavish shops. Visitors are free to stroll through, touching or embracing this maze of spinning water, all the while staying completely dry.

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Today's episode in what's apparently now a bridge and ferry project takes us to the Wheatland Ferry, a few miles north/downstream of Salem, OR at the tiny town of Wheatland. It's the same basic idea as the Canby Ferry, but busier; you pay while the boat's moving instead of prior to departure, probably to shave off a few minutes at the dock. At peak times -- summer and harvest time, primarily -- traffic tends to back up waiting to use the ferry. As this is the only river crossing of any kind between downtown Salem and the OR 219 bridge at Newberg, the Wheatland Ferry will likely be replaced with a bridge long before the other remaining Willamette River ferries. Not that it's all that likely in the near term; demand or not, a bridge -- even a utilitarian ugly one -- would still be expensive, and neither the state nor Marion County has a lot of cash lying around.

A 2009 Terry Richard column describes the ferry briefly, although he doesn't have a lot to say about river ferries that I haven't already covered here. There really isn't a lot to cover: You explain where it is, and tell the n00bs how to use the thing, and you might toss in a few snarky non-sequiturs if you happen to be me, which you probably aren't. You'd think there'd be a lot of fascinating history tidbits to share about the thing, given how long there's been a ferry at this location, but I haven't come across any yet.

The ferry does have a sorta-official website, although the page design is a retina-melting throwback to the Geocities/MySpace era. If there's a web browser out there that lets you disable tiled animated-gif background images, that would probably be the one to use. Failing that, welder's goggles would work, or you could try projecting the website onto a wall so that you aren't directly exposing your eyes to it. That's the safe way to observe a solar eclipse, so it might work for this website too. I note, in passing, that the link to their web design firm is a 404. FWIW.

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Longtime readers of this humble blog might be familiar with the ongoing bridge project I've been doing on and off for the last few years. So far I've covered the Portland metro area bridges on the Columbia, Willamette, and Clackamas rivers, the Willamette as far upstream as the OR 219 bridge at Newberg. There are a couple of other river crossings I haven't covered yet, however. Even today, in 2011, there are still three ferries operating on the Willamette River: The Buena Vista Ferry south/upstream of Independence; the Wheatland Ferry north/downstream of Salem; and the subject of this post, the Canby Ferry at Canby, which is operated by Clackamas County. And then there's the Wahkiakum County Ferry on the Columbia, which I did a post about way back in July 2007.

I've you've never used a car ferry before and worry about doing it wrong somehow, the process is very simple: You drive to the ferry landing, where there will be a stop sign or a red light, and you wait. The ferry, inevitably, has just left, and you have to wait for it to go all the way across the river and back. Which gives you time to make low-quality mobile phone videos of the ferry slowly crossing the river, which is exactly what I did. When the ferry arrives, it lowers a ramp and oncoming traffic drives off. Then the light will turn green (if there's a light), and an old guy will motion you forward. In my limited experience, ferries always employ a couple of old guys to run the show, and apparently nobody under age 60 or so is permitted to operate them. Depending on what sort of old guy you get, he may motion you to a particular spot, or he'll just assume you already know to drive forward and leave room for more vehicles behind you. You'll pay a small fare, usually a dollar or two, to one of the old guys. At the Canby ferry they do this before the ferry departs, I suppose so they can kick people off who didn't bring a spare dollar. Once the ferry's loaded, they raise the ramp you drove aboard on, and head toward the far bank of the river. The ferry doesn't turn around; there are ramps on both ends of the ferry, and the operators simply face the other direction and the stern for the last trip becomes the bow of the current trip, similar to the situation with Portland streetcars and MAX trains. Also similar to streetcars & MAX trains is the source of power, a set of overhead wires crossing the river above the ferry. Ferries are sometimes also connected to an underwater guide cable, which cuts down on the possibility of being swept downstream in a strong current.

It seems to me that would also cut a lot of the challenge out of sailing a ferry. But I'm not going out on a limb to say it's an easy job. I can already imagine the angry responses I'd get if I did, pointing out various difficult and dangerous parts of running the thing that we ignorant landlubbers have no clue about. Still, easy or otherwise, it seems like the job would get monotonous at times. If I happened to be a ferry operator, I'd be looking for ways to liven things up a little. For instance, every October we'd become a haunted river ferry, and we operators would get scary skeleton outfits and be Charon for Halloween.

Where was I? Oh, right. The ferry departs and slides along its guide cable to the far bank. So you get to sit in your car, not driving, as the scenery glides by for a few minutes. It's kind of weird. The Canby Ferry only takes a couple of minutes to cross, but you can use that time to make another video clip, which is exactly what I did.

Once you're at the other bank, the ramp in front of you is lowered and you go on your merry way. Vehicles may be two or three abreast, and it's not clear who's supposed to go first. I don't recall that being part of the Oregon driver's test, although it's been a couple of years since I took it. A handful of years, even. In any case, this being Oregon the right-of-way thing usually gets sorted out peacefully after a few rounds of false starts and polite oh-no-after-you-please-I-insist handwaving. Then you drive away, and the ferry handles a load of traffic going the other way.

In the research I've done so far, there's a distinct lack of colorful historical anecdotes associated with the Canby Ferry or its surviving cousins. Ferry service at Canby only began in 1914, which is quite late by Oregon ferry standards; many ferry locations were in use by the early 1840s. Since then there have been occasional difficulties, such as in 1946 when the ferry broke free during a storm and was swept over Willamette Falls to its doom, and wasn't replaced until 1953. An article in the November 12th, 1952 Oregonian details the launching of the replacement vessel, which wouldn't go into service until the following year. The article mentions that the Wilsonville ferry just upstream would soon be replaced by what's now known as the Boone Bridge, and describes the new ferry at Canby as the "newest, and probably last, of river ferries to be placed in service in Oregon". This turned out not to be the case; the 1953 vessel was replaced by the boat shown in this post in 1996, and I believe the other two ferries both received new ferryboats around the same time.

A September 1956 article in the paper's Sunday magazine (then known as "Northwest Rotogravure") suggests doing all three Willamette River ferries in a day, as part of a fun nostalgic country drive. It mentions in passing that all of the ferries were free to ride at that point; I'm not sure when that ended, but it was probably due to a local government cash crunch, since we seem to have those every few years. Or maybe the ferries attracted freeloaders who would just ride back and forth all day, hogging the limited space on board. Hippies, maybe, or just old guys with nothing better to do with their time. Who knows, really.

Which raises a question: Why is there still a ferry here instead of a bridge, here in the second decade of the twenty-first century? I can think of at least three possible reasons:

• Money's one, obviously. Building bridges is expensive, and apparently none of the 3 remaining ferry crossings has ever been a high enough priority to justify the expense. The Wheatland Ferry sometimes gets traffic jams of vehicles waiting to cross, but I've never heard of that being the case at Canby. Although I don't think you can reasonably estimate potential bridge usage by current ferry usage.
• Another reason specific to the Canby Ferry is suburban sprawl, or more precisely the avoidance thereof. Portland urban planners tend to see the Willamette River as a natural southern border to the Portland metro area, and there's a fear that if suburbia jumps the river, there will no stopping it until it fills the Willamette Valley down to Salem and possibly points south. So a bridge at Canby would be one too many ways across the moat, I think.
• And of course there's nostalgia, because ferries are a vestige of the distant past and some people want to keep them around even if they lose money and don't carry a lot of passengers. Which is more of a reason why they haven't been discontinued entirely rather than replaced with bridges.

In any event, the ferry's apparently cheap enough to run that it's not on the short list for budget cuts even in these austere times, and I haven't seen any recent proposals to replace it with a bridge. So it may be with us for some time to come.

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The fourth and final stop on the Lewis River waterfall excursion is Sunset Falls, several more miles upstream from Moulton & Yacolt Falls, just inside the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. The Forest Service's Sunset Campground is located right next to the falls, so parking is still pretty convenient even though we're way out in the middle of nowhere at this point. However since it's National Forest land you're going to need to buy a day pass in order to park legally. I seem to remember it was about $5. Because of that I stayed and watched the falls longer than I otherwise would have, in order to feel like I'd gotten my money's worth.



There's also one more twist to getting to the falls: Shortly after Moulton Falls, Lucia Falls Road veers away from the river and becomes Railroad Avenue, the road to the town of Yacolt. If you want to continue upriver, you need to turn right onto Sunset Falls Road, which will take you the rest of the way.

After Sunset Falls the road continues on into the forest as National Forest Road 42, but I don't know what condition the road's in or whether there's anything interesting up that way. Besides more forest, obviously.

Today's adventure takes us north a bit, to Lucia Falls on the East Fork of the Lewis River, NE of Battle Ground, Washington. This is the first of four Lewis River waterfalls you'll encounter while driving east/upstream on Lucia Falls Road. Three of them are pretty much right next to the road, too, so there's barely any hiking involved. This stop on the tour is clearly marked as Lucia Falls Park (operated by Clark County), which consists of a parking lot, a short, easy loop trail, and the falls.



Oh, and a bunch of signs explaining firmly that you are not supposed to go swimming, or diving, or rafting, or inner tubing here, and there's no fishing allowed, and, in short, you're not permitted to so much as touch the water, ever. And it's not for your protection, either, but for the endangered salmon. Which sounds kind of ridiculous and draconian until you realize there are no dams between Lucia Falls and the ocean. So the thinking is that the salmon on this branch of the Lewis River are maybe not quite as doomed as most salmon populations are, and they're going to great lengths to keep it that way. There may actually be a court order to that effect; I haven't been keeping track that closely, but it wouldn't surprise me.

One upside to the falls being a protected place is that at the right time of year you can come and watch salmon try to jump the falls on the way to their spawning grounds. There are a lot of other places you can go to fish or ride an inner tube down the river, but far fewer places -- at least accessible ones -- where you can see salmon doing their thing. So there's that.


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If you're unfamiliar with the area and need to find Lucia Falls Road first, it's reasonably simple. First go to Battle Ground, either SR 502 east from I-5, or SR 503 north from Vancouver. SR 503 is also known as 10th Avenue within Battle Ground, so you either stay on it, or turn left onto it, depending on which way you're coming from. After you're out of town, SR 503 also goes by Lewisville Highway. Drive north until you get to Rock Creek Road and turn right. It curves south & becomes 152nd Avenue. The road then curves right and becomes Lucia Falls Road (although a dead end part of 152nd also continues south). Once you're on Lucia Falls Road, all you need to do is watch for signs that say "Falls" on them.

This is just a video voyage through a carwash, taken earlier today. I kind of like the abstract quality the clip has, plus I've been procrastinating about washing the car for months now, so I'm kind of saying "Hey, look what I just did" by posting this, as unimpressive a feat as it might be. In my defense, there's really no point in washing a car while we're getting an inch of rain every day, which is most of the year. Furthermore, I also don't drive a lot, and I only remember how dirty the car is when I'm driving and trying to see out the windshield. Also, driving a clean shiny car is simply not the way of software engineers. It would be like wearing a suit to work or something. In short, the whole carwash thing is almost certainly a much bigger deal to me than it is to any of you out there.

Since you're here already, let me direct your attention to the Wikipedia article for "Car Wash", which includes a bit of history and explains briefly how automatic car washes work. For more gory details, there's a rather comprehensive HowStuffWorks article that explains the whole process in depth, with lots of photos. In case you've ever wondered what all the stuff spraying and flapping around is for, I mean. Oh, and here's a History Channel video with some vintage video clips and so forth. It's only about six minutes long, so I guess the History Channel just didn't have time to explain how car wash technology is connected to Hitler, UFOs, and Bigfoot. If they don't already have a multi-hour special on the topic, it's probably only a matter of time.

Anyway, the car's clean now. So now let's sit back and watch it rain nonstop for a few months.

A short video clip with the sun reflecting off the river. It's not something you see very often in this part of the world.

A low-quality video clip of Portland's Chiming Fountain, in lower Washington Park near Reservoir 3. I say "low quality" mostly because it's filmed sideways. My little digital camera at the time was happy to recognize that the camera was rotated for still photos, but not so much for videos. Camera makers, and YouTube for that matter, still tend to assume that all video is in landscape format, even though there's no longer any technical reason for that to be the case. YouTube supposedly has a function to rotate videos -- so instead of a rotated video I'd have a tiny right-side-up video with big black vertical bars on either side. In short, I blame society for this video's shortcomings.



Fortunately I had a few photos of the fountain lying around, and you don't have to wrench your neck or rotate your monitor or or anything to look at them, so I've included them too.



The important thing about this video is the audio track, where you can sort of make out the chiming sounds that give the fountain its name. It's nice and pleasant and would be even nicer without all the traffic a few feet away. Traffic was obviously not in the original Victorian-era plan, and with it you don't notice the chiming until you're up close to the fountain, and even then you may not realize that it's the whole point behind the fountain. And if you don't realize it's supposed to drip gently and make pleasant metallic sounds, you might just think it's a plain old fountain with a faulty pump or something, which it's not.

The link I provided above mentions that the fountain was originally painted white, and had a figure of a boy on top with a staff that sprayed water. Elsewhere I've seen the figure described as a Cupid or a cherub of some sort. He vanished mysteriously some time after 1912. Possibly the good taste police came by and removed him, on the principle that everything is better without cherubs.

This post probably counts as overkill. I've got a Flickr slideshow, an embedded Google map, and a Twitvid clip in this post, just to tell you about a small fountain in an obscure spot on the edge of downtown Portland. The Chimney Fountain is, as the name suggests, shaped more or less like an old brick chimney, with water bubbling up from the center and spilling down its sides. It's located next to SW Lincoln St., along the pedestrian-only 2nd Avenue walkway, in the 60's-era South Auditorium urban renewal district.

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It doesn't look particularly special or important if you don't know the backstory behind it. The chimney shape supposedly symbolizes the area before the urban renewal bulldozers arrived, a working class neighborhood of Jewish and Italian immigrants, with small houses, family businesses (including the deli with reputedly the best bagels in town), several synagogues, etc. For more about the old neighborhood, there's a Portland Jewish Review story and a Daily Kos essay you might be interested in. I wish I had a more concrete reference for the fountain-as-historical-marker part. I know I've read that before, but I haven't found a link to share yet. I'll update the post if I can document that, but until then don't cite this notion as a fact in your term paper, or wager large sums of money on it or anything.

The fountain does double symbolic duty, in fact, since it also serves as the "Source Fountain" in the Halprin plan for the area. The idea is that water bubbles up at a little spring here. Then, flowing north, it becomes a rushing mountain stream at Lovejoy Fountain, and finally a majestic waterfall at Keller Fountain. Symbolically, I mean. The water actually recirculates separately at each fountain, but no matter.

The fountain occasionally does triple duty, as a sort of jetted bathtub for the homeless. I'm sure that wasn't a design goal behind the fountain, but it appears to do the job. I didn't actually go and ask for a user review, I mean, if I was taking a bath and minding my own business, and a stranger came up and wanted to interview me, I'd take it rather badly. Wouldn't you?

Jellyfish at the Waikiki Aquarium. As always, I forgot to note the exact species shown in either video clip, which sort of limits the educational value here. And I could probably have gotten better clips if I'd filmed them with something other than a Blackberry, for instance if my DSLR took video, which it doesn't. And I'm sure they'd be much more relaxing if I added a gentle New-Agey piano soundtrack or something, if I knew anyone who made that sort of music, which I don't. But hey.

Here's a video I took around this time last year, trudging through ice and snow and slush in downtown Portland, wielding an iPod nano and trying not to fall over. It really wasn't all that much snow, but it was quite slippery and hard to walk in, hence the heavy breathing towards the end of the video, for which I'd like to apologize in advance. I'm sure it didn't help that I'd spent the entire day in meetings, leveraging proactive synergies outside the box on a go-forward basis. Also, it was uphill the whole way. Also, it was my birthday and dinner plans were cancelled due to the snow. A supremely crappy day all around.

So this year the plans are a little different, and involve vacation and a plane to somewhere a bit more tropical. Stay tuned.

A couple of video clips of downtown Portland's "Carwash Fountain", on the transit mall at SW 5th & Burnside. The city water bureau's page on downtown fountains describes it thusly:

Popularly known as "The Car Wash" (Officially Untitled)
Located at SW 5th and Ankeny Street.

This tubular fountain designed by Carter, Hull, Nishita, McCulley and Baxter was installed in 1977. A wind gauge shuts off its water on gusty days to prevent hazards for motorists.

There isn't a lot on the net about this architectural firm except for references to this fountain, but an intriguing detail emerges from a thesis titled "The Fate of Lawrence Halprin's Public Spaces: Three Case Studies", in reference to a park project in Fort Worth, TX:

The park was conceptualized by Halprin, but primarily designed and planned by associate Satoru Nishita, as indicated by the office documents. Therefore, when Lawrence Halprin and Associates disbanded in 1976, much of the correspondence reveals confusion regarding with whom Fort Worth officials should consult. The newly formed Carter Hull Nishita McCulley Baxter (CHNMB) seems to have been the primary contact after the Halprin and Associates breakup. Perhaps due to this final confusion, very little reference to this design exists.

Halprin and Associates, you may recall, was the firm behind Portland's Keller Fountain and Lovejoy Fountain, among other things. The Wikipedia bio for Halprin's associate Satoru Nishita indicates he worked on both of those projects, and apparently was the Nishita in the name of the subsequent firm. So this fountain has an interesting ancestry. And an unexpected one, since "Untitled" here looks nothing at all like the earlier two.

You might be curious why I posted a couple of video clips rather than the usual overly large set of fair-to-middlin' photos. For some reason I don't have a lot of photos of the thing, despite having an office a couple of blocks away for over 5 years. And of the few I've taken, none really seemed worth posting here. Part of the problem is that the wind sensor everyone goes on about also seems to detect me waving a camera around nearby, and the fountain has an uncanny way of shutting off as I'm framing a shot. Not really sure how that would be possible, but it's happened at least twice that I can recall. The once exception to that rule seems to be the shooting of brief yet boring video clips, so I have two of those, and here they are.

The YouTube video was previously seen here by the elite few people who visited that particular 2006 post. At the time I said:

It's often called the "Car Wash", but don't be fooled. If you try to wash your car in it, a nice policeman will drop by and shoot you full of holes. I mean, not to detract from the relaxing(?) tone of this post or anything, but the fuzz really will do it. Go ahead and try it if you don't believe me. [Legal Disclaimer: Don't!]

If I'd written this a couple of years later, it would have contained a waterboarding joke instead. Ah 2006, you were such an innocent bygone year... Anyway, what will actually happen is that you'll get a misdemeanor citation with a small fine and maybe some community service, plus the entire internet will make fun of you for a few days, especially if there's video, and forever after strangers will approach you on the street demanding to know if you're that carwash fountain guy/gal. Maybe you'll eventually get a cheesy reality show gag out of it, if you're lucky.

Elsewhere on the interwebs:

• Here is someone else's video, which is better than either of mine, not that that would be very difficult.


• Photos by Artnchicken, UnrulyJulie, & an overhead view by JAFO09


• Blog posts at Portland (OR) Daily Photo, EnzymePDX, Edward Blank, & The Travel Gal.

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Updated: This little post here has been lifted -- naturally without attribution or anything, by what looks like a spamblog. As far as I can tell, it's nothing but randomly swiped content about car washes, posted anonymously without any credits or bylines, and with hyperlinks stripped out for some reason. They don't appear to be selling anything, and there aren't even any ads there, so it's not clear what the point of it all is. There's surprisingly little one can do about content thieves on the interwebs if you aren't a ginormo-monstrous record company or movie studio. Google suggests you try a DMCA takedown. I still might do that, but I'm not a huge DMCA fan and I'd hate to seem hypocritical by using it to my advantage. What makes this doubly annoying is that the Portland Water Bureau posted links to the swiped post -- rather than the original -- on both Facebook and Twitter this morning, and the either haven't clued in on the mistake or haven't bothered to fix it. I mean, I'm not selling anything either, and I don't have any ads, so purloined content and waylaid traffic doesn't translate into lost revenue or anything. I'd have to say it's purely an ego or vanity thing: I just don't like to see people making off with my stuff, even if they don't benefit and I'm not harmed in any concrete way. And besides, the videos themselves are still getting hits from the copied post, even if the original post isn't. The fact that it was done anonymously is puzzling; I'd probably be even more aggravated if there was a name attached, someone falsely claiming to have written this post. As it is, it's merely incomprehensible. I just don't see what their angle is. Maybe they're trying to boost a search engine ranking for some reason. I didn't see anything weird in the page source, so if they're trying to give you malware, they're doing so very subtly. Or it's a fresh attempt to figure out (or confuse) Blogger's spamblog-detection algorithm. Or someone's being paid to blog about washing cars, and they're lazy/greedy and are taking the shortest of shortcuts. Honestly, I can't come up with very many plausible hypotheses as to what might be going on here. I'll update this again if I decide to try to anything about it, which I may or may not do.