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 Concrete, which 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!