Tuesday, June 22, 2010

A Sad Tail (Dave's entry)

(Note: On Monday we came home from our walk about found an old golden retriever lying on the door mat in our garage, waiting for whomever to arrive and offer him shelter. Here's Dave's rendition of what happened next.)

   The golden hung out on our outside doormat through the evening, sleeping after slurping water and ham. We went down with offerings of chicken about 9:00 p.m., and with sun still well up in the sky, it being the Summer Solstice. As Joanne fed him boneless chicken, upon closer observation I confirmed he was indeed a he, albeit neutered.
   Turns out the chicken and broth were a bit too hot. He paused from his dining and actually walked through the door Joanne had left open and into our family room. We called him out, and out he came. Turns out he understands "Come" and "Sit." But he seemed spooked by Joanne's camera near his head as she tried to take his picture. I noticed his water bowl had become a bit grungy, so I picked it up and walked with it around the corner to the hose bib by the garage door through which he had first entered our house. When I turned on the hose to fill the bowl, the confounded anti-siphon valve, which is apparently an integral part of every hose bib up here now, let out a God-awful squeal. Spooked him big time. He took off down the driveway, disappearing behind rocks and things green, purple and pink. When I next saw him he was northbound and down on the pavement, heading toward the end of our cul de sac. I whistled for him to come back. He looked over his shoulder and quickened his pace--away.
   Such is the saga of the damaged old golden.
   Pity. Yet perhaps just as well. We couldn't have kept him. Too many vet bills buried within those shakey haunches and that fur coat. But animal rescue is big up here. Perhaps he could have found, and may still find, a decent place in which to lie and die, instead of the cold forest floor toward which he was heading. At least he had his belly full and had had some rest. God only knows what human abuse caused him to be so skittish.
   Seems fitting that I write this here and now, enshrouded in the early morning fog we first saw last night miles away, that made parts of our distant view disappear and turned the rolling mountains of south Vancouver Island into a mysterious sort of Monument Valley, looking like the jagged, austere spires and plateaus of Arizona. Summer fog--reminds me of those of SoCal's Channel Islands. But today's fog compels the tugs I can't see in Rosario Strait before us to bellow their mournful lament, almost as though for the dog and the cruel aspects of humanity.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

A Busy Week

Somewhere to toss a line (6/13)
   Last Sunday Davy and I had to choose between going with Carl and Linda to the Scottish Games (watch the Wicked Tinkers!! it's super neat!) in Ferndale or staying home and vegging out.
   We did neither, which was a good thing since the Scottish Games were the previous weekend.
   Instead, we looked for fishing holes.
   No one was more delighted than Wes. He was in his element. 55 degrees out. Top down. Paws to the open road. Purring like a catnipped tabby.
   Heading east on Highway 20 we drove through Concretewhich was surely named for the stuff its silo is made from. Concrete oozed raw western cool, including a sheriff sittin’ in a rocking chair perched on the saloon’s porch.
   Further east we found spots for river fishing in Rockport State Park situated in an old-growth forest. Here’s a tree old enough for Davy and me to practically live in.
   Despite a few snags along the shore, its sandy berms tempted us. Wouldn't it be great to flop in a chair and let out a line chummed with salmon eggs?
   It was in reading Rockport’s signs that we discovered that the Skagit River houses all Pacific salmon  species, and that the park closes the river for extended periods to make sure a plentiful supply of salmon can get back up river to spawn.
   Next we checked out the public fishing scene off Sauk Store Rd. (Sauk River is an upstream tributary into the Skagit). With its wide, winding stream, the Sauk proved luscious, especially if you like to battle nettles. Egad!
   A couple hours into the trip, we headed northward into the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest  on Lake Baker Rd., giving us a front-row view of Mt. Baker rising into the clouds.
   Galorious!
   Because we had the top down and only had to share the road with one other car, we could hear the birds chirping from the trees. Honestly, it sounded like an orchestra’s flute section warming up!
   While we did find a terrific fishing spot in Panorama Campground along Lake Baker’s shores, which whet David’s camping gene, I suddenly realized that we needed to have a conversation covering how much I preferred a little cabin in the woods to living in a tent, fending off bears, using the public dump (zip-code lock, eek!), and making coffee in the morning’s frost. It was fun to do in my 20s. Not any more.
   Right where the paved road ended on Mt. Baker Road, we found this awesome sight. Boulder Creek, seven car-lengths wide, waiting at Mt. Baker’s base for this season’s snow fall to finally melt. We plan to come back up near the end of July to see how much more the stream bed’s filled in.
   Despite not finding the perfect fishing hole, we loved the day. We left Fidalgo Island at 2 p.m. and returned at 8:30, two bushed puppies with a to-do list that included getting fishing licenses, discovering what salmon and trout feed on, and finally cleaning out our tackle boxes and reels, which haven’t been touched in twenty years. PS – I can hardly wait to use my Uncle Bob’s aerospace-engineer-built fifty-year-old fishing rod in the perfect remote mountain pond we’ll eventually find!
And then on Monday . . . . (6/14)
   Monday was a most special day because I had dinner with a very missed sister-in-law and her daughters, whom I hadn’t seen in twenty-eight years.
   A little back story.
   Sadly, on June 8th of this year, my kids’ father Phil Rodasta died. Because Nic didn’t have all Phil’s siblings' contact information, I took it upon myself to find each of them and tell them the news. I located Susie by dialing 411. Carol and Skip were a little harder, but thanks to Facebook and assorted other Internet channels, I found them both, left my phone number, and crossed my fingers.
   Early the next morning, Phil’s older sister Carol (OMG! she looks like her mother!!) called, and I got to hear a voice I’d missed so much over all these years. And she’d missed me. And she said she’d be in Seattle the coming weekend, because her grandson was getting married. And wouldn’t it be wonderful to get together? And let’s figure out how to make this happen.
   So on Monday we met at the newly patched up Ivars in Mukilteo (a sunami hit it during the dinner hour a few years ago – eek!), right on the Sound, next to the Ferry landing.
   The reunion swept my heart and breath away. David and I had a fabulous time catching up with Carol, her husband Leonard, her two beautiful daughters Laura Lee and Shari, their husbands Mike and Mark, and Laura’s daughter Ali. Tears, laughter, retelling of stories. It just warmed me. What’s that line from Wilder’s Our Town? “You have to have life to love life, and you have to love life to have life.’ Amen.
The Stove
   Hey, I was born and raised in Southern California. Never in my life did I think I’d ever own or even shop for one of these things.
   But, because our home is built into a steep hill that holds the cold, our downstairs is a totally different climate zone than upstairs.
   And this is what Sounders buy to warm their downstairs.
   Next shopping adventure: Buying a generator for when the forests blow down and we don’t have electricity for a day, a week, or, God forbid!
New Sighting
   We’re such nerds. We have bird books in the living room right next to the two pairs of binoculars.
   Good thing, because we had a waxwing roost on our torii.
Saturday Morning – Deception Pass Park (6/19)
   After hitting the local farmer’s market, we headed over to Bowman Bay (If you click on the map, we live just above the R of Rosario Rd.) for a joint Shamish-Swinomish celebration. They made fried bread and grilled salmon, drummed and sang, and showed people how to make thread out of nettles (eek!) which could then be woven into blankets. It was actually a fund-raiser to help pay for their canoe trip to Neah Bay, which makes
me shudder just to think about it. They have these little canoes which they’re rowing out to the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, with its treacherous waters. Lahdeedah. Evidently they do this every year, and I’m a big sissy.
   We didn’t join in the festivities because fried bread isn’t on our diet, and anyway we wanted to down go to the shore and check out the canoes, which turned out to be new and made someplace in Canada, proving there is a market for contemporary Indian canoes.
   Loved the sight of lots of little kids romping down at the shore exploring the canoes. It made me wonder if they’re hoping to grow up to be Indians, like I used to dream of being a cowgirl, and my students imagined becoming astronauts.
   Afterward, we walked down the pier and saw a herd of fish flitting just below the water’s surface, spied another pier across the bay calling our attention, and visited the stone-and-lumber interpretive center, which was built in that 1930’s style that evokes FDR, Yosemite’s Ahwanee Hotel, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The center focused on the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), who built Deception Pass in the 30s, and whose individual participants described their memories with the CCC as “the best times of their lives.” Evidently Roosevelt wanted to “build men, as well as forests.” You want a little history on this? Check out this, and this for how they built the bollards. (Really, they're neat!!!)
   The other pier we visited was at Rosario Beach, but still part of Deception Pass Park. Here’s me in front of the Salmon Maiden, which the park service brilliantly surrounded with ultra thorny bare-hipped roses. BTW, the maiden on the other side has a different face. Symbolic? Realistic? We don’t know. We should have read the sign. We’ll be back and do just that!


Sunday, June 13, 2010

All Over the Place, a joint entry

   We were crazy busy for the last two days.
   Friday morning we hiked around Heart Lake then had dinner with fellow Mensans in Oak Harbor (Whidbey Island).
   Saturday David took Wes to Deming for the Logger Fest (it was a top-down day), and I attended the Whidbey Island Writer’s Association one-day conference.
The Heart Lake Hike

   We again followed our intrepid Friends of the Forest leader Denise Crowe through the forest surrounding Heart Lake, near Fidalgo Island’s center. All along the path we saw the usual trees perforated by Pileated woodpecker’s rectangular(!) holes,  ultra sweet-scented Nootka roses (think boiled-down rose water), rattlesnake plantain, and banana slugs. The big surprise, and probably such a rare find it should be documented by someone more knowledgeable and anal than I: a gregarious blue garlic snail. I have never met a snail so curious and pleased to meet twenty people standing on a forest path. Denise carried him up and down our line. Would he hide in his shell? No way. He couldn’t get enough of us. He oozed further and further out of his shell, craning his whole body for a better view of us. We could almost hear his inner dialogue: “Wow, look at these trees! Dang, I forgot my camera!”
   The problem, though, was that we wanted him to be upset so he’d reek garlic for us. (Many of us noted that he might be the perfect escargot snail.) Alas!
   Another find on the trail was a flock of robins upset with a spotted or barred owl, who are cousins to each other. (Long story short: barred owls flew into the Rockies and split, half going west to evolve into spotted owls, and the others flying east and staying the same.)
   We never saw the owl, but we got the scoop on barred owls, who’ve remigrated west and are pushing out the spotted owls. These are, according to Denise, less-than-wise birds, who routinely steal red baseball caps and attack pony-tailed joggers whom they totally mistake for squirrels. People actually need hospitalization from these attacks (think jaws and talons! Eek!).
   A neat thing Friends of the Forest does with its outreach program is to take the local school kids on forest hikes in fall and spring. In the fall, each kid adopts a plant, which stays rooted in the forest. Then in spring, they come back to see how it’s faired. They draw pictures of it, write odes to it, research it like crazy, and probably even fall in love with it so when they grow up and can destroy the forest in many little ways, they don’t. Which is at least part of the reason why Fidalgo Island’s forests are so wonderful to experience.

The Mensa Dinner
   We met at San Remo’s in Oak Harbor and had a fun little time with six other Mensans: a Unitarian Universalist minister, a recovering lawyer, an engineer with WASHDOT (WA dept. of transp.), an artist,  an Englishman, and a journalist chronically the activities of the notorious BTK of Kansas.  (Yep, she’s interviewed him! Egad!)
   The evening’s topic of conversation, which actually proved VERY transformative, derived from the bumper sticker, “The Hokie Pokie—that’s what it’s all about.” Think about it. Putting in, taking out. Hokie Pokie.

Deming Logger Fest (Dave)
   It’s a bright and sunny June Saturday. Therefore it is time to take Wes’s top down and drive to one of Washington's ubiquitous weekend festivals with Carl Burgan and Linda Page: the 48th annual Deming Logging Show.  Carl’s candy-apple red Miata is Wes’s new best friend. (p.s. The fest started out in 1962 as a fundraiser for "busted" loggers.)
   As we drove east on a narrow, 35-mph country road, Bellingham faded in the rear view mirror. At Deming, we pulled onto a grassy, open field filled with campers, logging trucks, Caterpillars, 'dozers, and cars, cars, cars. Beer bellies, dungarees, suspenders, t-tops and shorts were everywhere. We parked and covered our cars to protect them from the sun, sap, and spraying saw dust.
   We joined the throngs entering the gate and find our seats in the stands to watch the human grizzly bears compete in axe throwing, speed-pole climbing, hand and double bucking, chain saw bucking, log rolling, standing block chop, loggers relay, and iron man racing. Phew. The day was capped by the hot saucing events, where the chainsaw’s manufacturer-recommended motor is replaced with a V-6 Merc, or a Harley. The funny cars of the chainsaw gang. Check it out!
   We bailed the promised BBQ because the line snaked through the vendors’ booths and outdoor museum displays. After dining at Lychee Buffet in Bellingham, I beat Joanne home by fifteen minutes. Again, life is good!

Writer Fest (Joanne)
   One of the things I most miss about leaving California are my writing friends and groups, and writing in general. After three months of unpacking, rearranging and generally creating a new lifestyle, I was ready to start creating a local tribe, of which my California tribe will be a part of by default.
   So naturally I immediately signed up for Whidbey Island’s one-day writing conference as soon as I found it on Google.
   It was wonderful, it was different, it was all the things it needed to be.
   First, unlike all the other conferences I’ve been to, the breakout groups were called Chat Houses and were held in people’s homes around Whidbey Island, which is not such a bad fate. Lovely homes!!! Fabulous yards (I’m jealous!!). Stupendous views of Seattle with the snow-capped Cascades in the background. WOW. But not distracting because . . .
   Jamie Ford (Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet), held forth on the craft, discipline, and joys of writing his first book to be published, but not his first book to write. Followed by Nancy Horan (Loving Frank) giving me my first mesmerizing talk on historical fiction, and agent Amy Burkhardt getting down and dirty about what turns her on and off when she reads a manuscript’s first few pages.
   My two agent consults went great. Yippee!
   And the dinner was fun, because Elizabeth George, who lives in Langley on Whidbey (and once lived in Huntington Beach) spoke. Dinner was a wonderfully intimate affair in which local ladies made and served the dinner on china, silver, and crystal they’d brought from home. WOW!
   And I’ve found a writing group. Agent Andrea Hurst holds a writing group every Wednesday noon at a restaurant in Coupeville on Whidbey. It’s not a critique group, but it came HIGHLY recommended by fellow attendees.
   I’m really delighted with the connections I made, and look forward to deepening those acquaintances. I regret, however, that I met not one person from Fidalgo Island, which seems rather odd to me. What this foretells, I know not.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

The Killing Fields (Dave's entry)


   The PNW is notorious for its wind storms, one of which knocked down 10,000+ trees (they quit counting after clearing 1200 from the trail system) on our little island in 2006. We’ve experienced a couple of these storms, which demonstrated to us what a mess our fifteen huge pampas grass clumps make when the very tough grass blades blow all over the neighborhood, compelling me to traverse the area to pick up my trash. Speaking of trash. There are, in our neck of the woods, limits to how much trash you can put out for pick up, thank you very much. And it seems that the collected grass blades from a single wind storm take up an inordinate amount of our allotted trash capacity, even when unceremoniously busted in half and stuffed into our miniscule trash container. So the decision to get rid of the pampas grass clumps evolved naturally.
   Fortunately, getting rid of the clumps was easy. We wrote a check to a guy with a chain saw.
   Unfortunately, getting rid of the root balls is not so easy.
   Our chain-saw guy said they it be too time con$uming for him to dig out. He suggested covering them with black mat for two years to prevent the light and rain through so they would rot out. If we wanted to speed the process, we could add rock salt, although that would make it tough for other stuff to grow there for a spell. Two years with black tarps on the four-foot wide root balls??? With rocks on them to keep them in place in the wind storms???? Didn't sound like much of a solution to us!
   So we asked the guy at the local Sebo Hardware Store. He chuckled at the rock-salt suggestion of our chain-saw guy. Ha! We live on an island, relatively close to shore; the ground is already plenty salty. Worse, the pampas grass actually likes basic soil such as would result from our prospective application of rock salt.
   Instead he suggested copper and vinegar. He said copper kills everything. Of course! I immediately recalled from reading naval history (Horatio Hornblower, etc.) that, indeed, copper does kill stuff. It sheathed the hulls of the old wooden sailing ships, and it was the primary active ingredient in anti-fouling boat bottom paint, that is until the environmentalists in turn killed it because it not only rid boat bottoms of barnacles, it also killed everything in the harbor.
   The Sebo guy took us over to the electrical department in the store and pulled off a couple of feet of 14/2 Romex wire. He said to strip the insulation off of the two conductors which, along with the third uninsulated ground wire, would provide the copper necessary.
   We took him at his word and went home to do the necessary stripping (of wire). Note: It hadn’t even been a week and our root ball problem had worsened, for merely whacking off the grass blades did not prevent the clump from springing right back. Not only would we have to kill the clumps, we’d have to remove them.
   After stripping the wire and cutting it into 6-inch pieces, we headed to Costco to buy the necessarily large supply of vinegar we needed.
   With vinegar in hand, I undertook to insert the copper wire into the root balls. This proved more difficult than I had anticipated (what a shock). The not-so-little grass stalk clumps were so compact I had to muscle a hunting knife into them, then wiggle and waggle the knife to permit insertion of the copper wire. A tip for you here: After you place the copper wire into the knife-dug hole, push the wire down with the butt end of the knife handle instead of your thumb, as the copper wire will pierce the end of even a leather glove, and of course the end of your thumb as well. Take it from me.
   Then with eight of the little wires strategically inserted into each of the root balls at appropriate locations, I "watered" the balls with a full gallon of vinegar each, pouring judiciously into the areas containing the copper wire. Voila! Sit back and wait for vinegar to leach off the copper and the suckers to wither and shrivel up.
   Alas, not so fast. How long was I actually going to have to sit and wait for this withering and shriveling? While it appeared after a time that the green shoots around the edges of the root balls I had copper and vinegared were not quite as robust and healthy as those coming from the root balls not so treated, there were still green shoots, and they were still growing. Thus it has become apparent that either I do not have the proper copper-and-vinegar technique, or I do not have the patience to wait for it to do its stuff.
   So notwithstanding the chain-saw guy not wanting to spend the time to dig out the root balls, I, being a homebody now, have undertaken a campaign to do just that. Regrettably, I am old and my body not used to such labors. Thus progress is slow, and made slower yet by my need to educate myself about the "perf pipe".
   Perf pipe is used here in the PNW to route downspout drains away from the houses to the street so rainwater does not collect near foundations. It is black corrugated plastic about 4 inches in diameter and buried underground leading away from the house to the street. It is perforated in places to allow the rain water to seep into the soil enroute to the street, but not flood it. It is also buried beneath at least one of my pampas grass root balls, namely the one I attacked yesterday. The root ball loved it as a source of water so was quite entwined with it, thank you very much.
   In my 2-3 hours spent digging, I successfully dug up the root ball and a huge supply of rocks, but also a large segment of this perf pipe, which I must now replace.
   Aside from the joy of this unexpected perf-pipe education, yesterday also brought the pleasure of knowing that our small shovel collection (two) appears to be up to the task of tackling our local rock garden, which passes for soil. Despite numerous encounters with hardness large and small, our shovels, large and small, await me now downstairs in the garage, ready for another fun day digging in the dirt.
   So I am off to that, and I look forward to giving you a favorable report on my process. But for this day, yours truly, Mr. Patience Personified, is going digging because he is unwilling to wait for decomposition where shovels can succeed.










Saturday, June 5, 2010

24 Hours

The Art Walk (note click on pictures to enlarge)

   Friday afternoon, David and I ate salmon dinners at Randy's Pier 61 before hitting the streets for Anacortes's First Friday Art Walk. The plein air stuff was nice, and so was the jewelry, but I have to admit, I need a lot more umph to my art. Luckily we did find two galleries that fit our bill. First was Al I-Make-Stuff Smith's  cave, who, cross my heart, makes .064 inch-long stuff and floats it in acrylic for inspection. Crazy cool.
   Lastly and fortunately, we found, and will return to, the Anchor Art Space,  down by the waterfront. Can't help it, but I'd always rather spend an hour staring at some conceptual art piece than a perfectly-composed lavender field painting. We were so thrilled we had a drink from their fire hydrant out front and went home to watch the sun set.
   I digress. (Sorry)
   David and I have yet to get over PNW sunsets. They have all SoCal's pink, red, orange, and purple jewel tones, but they also have precious metals. Accompanying most sunsets is a sunlight so vivid it renders the Sound a bathtub of blinding silver, platinum, or gold. We have to shut the blinds. It's so all-at-once awful and wonderful.

 Back to the 24 hours.
The Forest Walk
   Despite the gooey mess the path was after weeks of rain, this morning David and I took a Friends-of-the-Forest Hike around Big Beaver Pond off Cranberry Lake. Fidalgo Island has lots of lakes and forests, and the community works to take great care of these lands, while also making them multipurposely available to the population (hiking, horsebackriding, dirt biking). Denise Crowe ( her picture's at the bottom) led the way, which meant we got to see the forest through her eyes. Good thing, because she knew EVERYTHING! What a trip!
   She knew bird sounds and stopped every now and then to identify who was chirpping.
In my eyes, the winner for the Best Sounds Display was the winter wren, who, with only one tiny lung, makes a long, loud series of chirps. Really! Listen! Click the link. One microscopic lung, and we could hear it from a hundred yards away, or maybe fifty, I forgot to bring my measuring tape. She then told us that winter wren men make a bunch of nests, to which they then invite the winter wren women. If a wren woman likes a nest, he fixes it all up for her, and she lays eggs, along with the other wren women who liked his other nests.
   We learned about forest oderifics, such as Herb Robert (locally known as Stinky Bob) and the ginormous and aptly-named skunk cabbage.
   We ate salmonberries and learned that they come in the same three colors salmon eggs come in (if you don't buy the phlorescent kind); hence the name.
   And lastly, we learned that nurse logs (not to be confused with hospital protocol) can be really old, like fifteen, and can provide a platform for new growth above the fray, so to speak. BTW, brand new knowledge here: if a PNW forest floor is covered with ferns, the trees are probably cedars, but if the floor is covered with salal, which I'd never heard of, it's probably a fir forest.
   My own observation of the forest we visited today is that it had hardly any madrone (madrona?). Very odd for up here. But the forest we visited today also surrounds the ancient city dump, so who knows what else won't grow. And why.  
   I was hoping to see some beaver and otter running around, but we only saw signs of their dams and mounds.  According to Denise, the beaver do a stupendous job enlarging and maintaining the lake so the city doesn't flood. Very symbiotic. (Actually, now that I remember it, she said the beaver built the lake! Kudos!)    
   Unexpectedly, and most likely a sign that great fortune is coming our way, we saw Lisa's college mascot (UCSC's banana slug) partaking of a local nurse log's oyster mushroom crop. (BTW, all of you who embrace the fairy mushroom myth, like moi, Denise said that the fungus covers the inside of the big circle, and the mushrooms are the flowering lei around its edges. I did not know that before!) 
   At trail's end, the sun was shining, setting the forest all aglitter, and warming the air enough to make the dragon and damsel flies willing to come out of their coccoons after three years underwater. But that's another story! Another forest walk. Another 24 hours. life is good.