Berkshire Bliss

One of my dear friends got married in the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts on August 19^th. This is one of the girls from my Memorial Day Weekend trips, and all of us made it to the weekend’s events, including Ian and me who set five alarm clocks before our 6:30am flight and didn’t even sleep through the first one, and C, who came with beautiful 2-week-old Avery. Yes, that’s not a typo. Even L and S made it, although Continental did everything in their power to keep that from happening. It’s a long, bitter story, but the upshot is, or rather upshots are: 1) don’t fly into Newark, but 2) really, really don’t fly Continental. We were on Delta, on the other hand, and had a lovely time—flight attendants were friendly, we got food and movies even in steerage, people went out of their ways to fix our seat assignments, which disappeared without exception before each of our four legs of flight. It turns out that at least some of my phobia of flying has to do with my feeling of being a target. And a flight from Seattle to Cincinnati didn’t seem all that threatening to me, and the 50-passenger Comair flights from Cincinnati to Albany seemed entirely safe. Until this Sunday morning, that is.

But I digress.

Anyone who’s traveled in the Berkshires in the summer (or, probably, any time of year), knows that it’s expensive. It’s also aggressively quaint, full of ancient tree-covered hills and winding roads connecting 300-year-old towns nestled all snug in river valleys and curves of topography. It’s the home of Tanglewood, where the Boston Symphony Orchestra spends its summers. James Taylor lives in Lenox, one of the larger villages. It’s also the vacation destination of every upper middle class family in New York and Boston that doesn’t go to the Hamptons or the Cape. A motel room runs at least $170/night.

To save money, and also because we like each other, we Memorial Weekend girls and our various partners and/or gay husbands rented a house instead. This was a much better deal for the 10-12 of us, at $1800 for the entire week, except that weeks invariably run Sat-Sat in vacationland and many of us were arriving on a Thursday. I found a property that had both the main house, however, and a small cottage as well, and the owner agreed to let us have the small cottage for Thursday and Friday nights—we’d basically be camping—and the large house until we left town (which was two nights before the end of our week, so she got a good deal, too). What I will say about the cottage is that it was definitely rustic . . . and that if Continental had actually gotten L&S to Albany Thursday night as they were supposed to, instead of closing the jetway door in the girls’ faces as they approached from their other Continental flight (this is literally true), it would’ve been a tight squeeze.

I had a moment of confusion at 5:15 Friday morning when I heard, from the sleeping loft Ian and I were sharing, CNN radio start up very loudly directly down from me, where B was sleeping on one of the couches. “I know B’s a lawyer,” I thought with irritable sleep-muddled logic, “but does he have to listen to the news right now?” I eventually figured out that he must still have his earplugs in and be sleeping through the preset alarm, and I stumbled down the ladder, almost pitching head-first onto the pine floor, to turn it off myself. “Goddammit!” B gasped out as I approached, and flailed for the off switch. A couple hours later, Ian and I woke up for good and slipped out of the house to celebrate our own 5^th anniversary with breakfast alone before the weekend’s events swept us up.

The wedding was one of those awesome affairs including nail appointments, a casual rehearsal dinner, short but lovely ceremony followed by a cocktail reception (full bar!) and then dinner (all vegetarian and really tasty, particularly the squash blossoms filled with white bean paste) and dancing and a multi-tiered cupcake “cake”, then a brunch and badminton tournament the next morning at a family farmhouse—so all the guests really had time to get to know each other/get reacquainted. And in our down time, once we moved into the large house and had space to lounge, we ate cheese and crackers and fresh fruits and vegetables and crepes (S brought two crepe pans and a chef’s knife in her luggage . . . TSA obviously checked her bags) and drank beer and wine, and talked endlessly with each other, and talked endlessly with shockingly verbal Paige, now the almost-three-year-old big sister, and watched Avery learning how to observe (“This person’s face is different from that person’s face,” her eyes seemed to say, staring from me to L and back again), and practicing her proto-smile.

And then a last meal with the blissful newlyweds (who received a lot of cast-iron cookware, considering their Brooklyn walk-up).

And then home, to start our own sixth year of (still blissful) marriage.

Falling Behind

I’ve been gone the last two weekends, for a wedding in western Massachusetts and a getaway with Ian’s brother and sister-in-law in Whistler, and I’ve so far completely failed to write anything about either. But I do have some things to say, so stay tuned!

Late Breaking News

It turns out that my ass is not, as I had previously assumed, made of spring steel. Over the last week, my tailbone has increasingly ached, to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore (at least without knowing what was causing the pain), and on Saturday morning Ian and I went to the emergency room. After 8 hours (my problem was clearly not a crisis and there were, in fact, crises going on that day), X-rays, and blood tests, we were finally discharged with the diagnosis Old Fracture. This means that it’s not currently broken, but it was (presumably when I somersaulted over the head of Sikem last May) and I have evidently strained the new tissues around the area, so it’s causing me pain. Particularly when I go to the bathroom, but not, in fact, so much the rest of the time, except during the process of standing up or sitting down.

Contributing factors to the pain could include 1) the active summer I’ve spent: kayaking, riding, throwing around hay, and restarting Pilates, and 2) the fact that my hormones, chemically dormant for 5 years, are starting to reassert themselves, which could affect the tissues. It seems that all I can do is be careful, and not get constipated, and take Ibuprofen if I need something for pain. I said to the doctor, who was very tired and appeared to be about 7 months pregnant, that I didn’t have any riding lessons scheduled for the near future and she said “No. You will not ride a horse until this doesn’t hurt at all.”

Sigh.

Detroit Follow-up

Yes, folks, we did make it. The third person we spoke with once we got to SeaTac finally offered to let us each pay $25 to reserve space on the evening non-stop from Seattle to Detroit, and was surprised no one had given us the option before. (note: if you ask for stand-by, be prepared to stick with your current routing. And don't expect an airline grunt to think outside the box. Ask to pay some small fee instead.) We even got a window and a middle seat, and so were in perfect position to enjoy the spectacular light show taking place over Duluth as we passed (the pilot conscientiously avoided flying directly through the electrical storm). It was so fantastic, in fact, flash after flash, lightening ripping through the clouds in jagged bolts, that a flight attendant got on the radio and admonished us all to turn off our reading lights and look out the window! Which virtually everyone did. It was really amazing, and we only caught a little turbulence at the end, right before landing in Detroit, where it was 12:40 am. This was 8 hours after Ian and I had intended to arrive, before (evidently) choosing to sleep in, in our own beds, instead, so instead of blearily collecting our car, we checked into the new Westin hotel that is right in the terminal, and had a blissful mini-vacation, just the two of us.

The next morning we picked up our rental car and drove to Ann Arbor, which, from what we could see in our two days driving around the Detroit area (which, granted, doesn’t really give it a fair opportunity to impress), really is the best place to go in Michigan. By far.

We stayed with my linguistics friend G and his Swedish wife A, who are charming and interesting hosts, and whose small apartment holds even more books than our house (though not by much, I think). They encourage the local wildlife, so we were treated to multiple birds (I couldn’t even identify one species if G hadn’t told me what they were), multiple squirrels, and even, to my alarm, a late-night skunk. I will say, the skunk is really an adorable animal. Particularly since it seemed to think the same of us, and wandered off without spraying. Houseguests and fish smell after three days, they say . . . but I think adding skunk to the mix might speed up that schedule a little.

We had a couple brief Eminem moments; one when we passed 8 Mile Road on the way to the wedding venue in Rochester, and the other after we returned home and realized that the wedding location was the same as Eminem and Kim’s most recent (and most recently failed) second nuptials. Meadow Brook Hall did not publicize their famous clients.

The wedding itself was beautiful, with the 3 bridesmaids in varying shades of purple to coordinate with the groom’s hair, and a collection of Carleton students I’ve seen now at four weddings (including my own), so I felt like part of the crowd.

The only bad part of the trip was arriving at the airport at 7:00am on Monday morning (or thereabouts) and finding that our seats together—one window, one center—had been switched to two center seats. Which meant we weren’t seated together. And there were no other seats available anywhere on the plane, except maybe one or two middles. It seems that, when we missed our flight Friday morning, our entire reservation had been un-confirmed. The attendant who put us on the replacement flight reconfirmed the rest of our reservation . . . but evidently not our seats. So we arrived after virtually everyone else had checked in online, and snatched up our good seats. This was incredibly distressing to me, up to the point where we actually boarded the plane, and the man sitting on the aisle next to me agreed graciously to switch with Ian.

And so it all worked out, and two more great people are enjoying newly-married bliss.

Okay, Yeah, I See Your Point . . . But Sometimes You Just Oversleep

Ian and I were supposed to be on a plane right now—not just at the airport, but actually on a plane—but we overslept. Way overslept—I set my alarm for 4:15am, and didn’t wake up until 6:40am, 20 minutes before our plane took off, and ten minutes after the latest we could possibly leave our house if we were going to get to the airport . . . in time to pick up someone whose plane landed at 7:00am. So yeah, late.

Now, since last Saturday evening, I’ve periodically been feeling what I believe is my dad’s presence—a sort of prickling of the skin on my left arm and neck, which usually can’t be explained away with drafts, even though our 80-year-old house is drafty. And last night, after we got home from our jazz gig and before falling into bed, exhausted, at 1:00am, finally packed, I felt it a lot. I’m not a huge believer in the occult, or ghosts, or whatever . . . but I am a strong believer in the idea that I cannot possibly know everything, and so I should remain open-minded. So, when I feel my arm prickle, I usually acknowledge Dad. I occasionally wonder if he’s there for a reason—protection? Or merely to visit? At any rate, I briefly thought—“maybe he’s warning me to not take this flight,” and I did a careful diagnostic of my other senses and extra-senses . . . and didn’t really come up with anything alarming.

My brother was going to take us to the airport, picking us up at 5:00am. He’s been practicing polyphasic sleeping for a few months now, and so he’s become the obvious choice for off-hours favors. When he arrived home last night, however, his wife (who’s also been doing it) offered to drive us instead. Well, this morning he woke up from a nap at 5:10 and realized she was sound asleep next to him in bed, instead of on her way to the airport, us already in the car. He leapt up and raced down to our house, which was pitch black when he arrived. He called our house phone, then sent me a text message to my cell, then assumed—reasonably—that we had taken a taxi or driven a car to our grandmother’s house and taxied from there, and that we were fine. He went home.

My cousin, who’s staying here with us right now while he and his wife fix up the house they recently bought, was evidently asleep still at 5:35am when Deane gave up and went home; he also evidently got up and showered and was out of the house to work without realizing we were still in bed—and without waking us.

And so, we did not hear the alarm, the house phone, the cell phone, or the person departing for work. Those are a lot of things to not hear, particularly for me, who always hears everything. We irrevocably did not make our flight. So—assistance from the other side, keeping us from a flight that would have been dangerous to us? Or is this the only clue I need to solve this mystery: “falling into bed, exhausted, at 1:00am.”?

Kayak Trip 2006: Blake Island (Saturday), or A Reminder to Live Fully

Saturday morning dawned early and gray, actually, which was a relief after two days of intense sun. A bit groggy from our pirate-laced sleep, we all took our time stumbling around camp and no one, I will say, leapt into a boat to take advantage of the cool morning stillness. Laura and Sonja made some Cream of Wheat (not so well received, or not so universally received, as their pasta and Kate’s salad of the night before, which I forgot to rave about in my disgruntlement at pirates), and Mario and Mia rounded out our morning meal with breakfast burritos. Deane and Erika paddled off soon after, headed to Manchester across the channel in search of more camp stove fuel and un-iodined water. The Puppies tumbled out of their tent and milled about eating cereal and burritos, Laela found the bow and arrow and quiver she’d fashioned the first afternoon from flotsam on the beach and tacked from person to person, threatening to shoot us (we were in no real danger, as you might imagine). The ranger came by on his morning rounds and we pulled him aside to complain about the pirates. He was sorry to hear that we’d had trouble, and had thought himself on his 9:30pm tour around the island in his skiff, that the boat looked like potential trouble. They were fairly quiet then, though—not enough use yet of the beer bong, I expect—and so he’d gone on his way. He informed us that in the future it was perfectly reasonable to call 911 and they would call his direct line, or send over a sheriff. He then asked if we happened to know if any of the boaters happened to be on shore. Mia pointed behind us, to where a very pirate-looking man, tan with a ponytail and earrings, was standing at the base of our sandstone cliff, watching his 8-year-old son clamber about. Oh. So that’s who that was.

Our friend the ranger took the man aside, and evidently asked him to leave; the boat sailed less than an hour later.

At noon a group of us decided to paddle over to Manchester dock to see what kind of water/ice cream options were available to us on that shore (Butterfinger bars and Aquafina); back in camp we met up with Deane and Erika, who’d traveled many miles south along the peninsula until they found more gas for our stoves. Some swimming took place, some naps, some lunches of sandwiches, some drinks of filtered water. Some catch with two of the Puppies and Deane, for at least 45 minutes, waist deep in the 45 degree water.

In the late afternoon, Laura, Sonja, Deane, Erika, the Puppies and I all decided to walk the long southern route around the island to get some ice cream and see the sights. The one thing about kayaking is that your legs are pretty much useless except as ballast and a little for stability, but they don’t get to work much (except in this kind of kayak, which we didn’t have). I generally find that I need to run, really run, for at least a little bit as soon as I’m on land. So the long (3.3 miles total) loop trail is perfect.

On the way home, after we’d drunk them out of fresh strawberry milkshakes and I’d enjoyed—very, very much I will say—my chocolate rootbeer float, we took turns “skipping” each other, to everyone’s entertainment.

This is something Ian and I discovered in late winter when we had an urge for ice cream and decided to walk rather than drive down to Fremont. Walking took too long, so we started to skip, and then we had a brilliant idea. Basically, two people start skipping arm in arm. On a particular skip, pre-arranged or not, the person whose arm is below flings the person whose arm is above straight up while skipping up. The result is an unexpected loss of gravity for the person who’s being flung, which is hysterically funny. The problem with doing this with only two people is that the flungee is inevitably flung a little to the side. Generally, this isn’t too much of a problem; when I introduced Deane to the concept, I managed to launch him only enough to lift him a little and surprise him into schoolgirl giggles. When he returned the favor, however, he launched me so hard I flew into the scrub on the side of the path (which surprised me, and then him, into hearty guffaws). Having one person on either side, though, you get more lift and more stability. And so, everyone was skipped, and we arrived back in camp breathless and laughing and all talking at once to everyone who was already there.

“Wait, you guys,” said Mia, breaking in. “There’s something going on down the beach—some people just came up in a ski boat and they’re calling for help. Someone passed out or something?”

I gazed down the beach and my heart did a little flip. Sure enough, the activity of the multitudes of other campers who’d come to stay throughout the weekend, living up to kayak man’s predictions of a full campground, was tinged a frantic yellow. I started down the beach, just behind Laura who called out “I know CPR! I’m certified in CPR!”. We waved the ski boat in toward shore and started out to it. “Do you want me to come?” I asked Laura. “Yes,” she replied.

As we reached the stern of the speed boat, I called up to the driver, who was clearly freaked out, to put it in neutral. He cut the engine and I climbed up on the swim platform and helped Laura up after me. “Okay!” I called as we tumbled on board. As we headed out to the buoys, Laura started asking questions. “Is it a relative of yours?” No. “Has she been drinking?” They didn’t know. “How long has she been down?”

We docked abruptly next to another ski boat rafted on to the main boat, a 35-40 foot cabin cruiser, and Laura made her way across to the aft where the victim was lying, prone, on the deck. I stayed out of the way and ready to assist in any way I could, in the rafted ski boat, with the owner of that boat, who appeared to be either a friend or relative of the victim.

I sat quietly in the gorgeous, golden-glowing evening sun, rocking gently on the water, and listened to the activity flow around me. First Laura’s voice, calmly repeating her questions. Then a sister, or a friend, of the victim, on the phone with 911 on the deck just above my head, repeating instructions. “They say 15 compressions then one breath, then 15 compressions then one breath,” and into the phone, “it looks like there’s some air in her stomach. Should we try to push that out?”, then back to the people performing CPR “Make sure her head is tilted way back when you give her breaths.” And from someone on deck, “Her color’s better.” and her teenage son, agonizingly, on the phone with the Coast Guard, “WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU! YOU’RE GOING TO GO HOME TO YOUR MOTHER TONIGHT AND MINE IS GOING TO BE DEAD!”

The park ranger arrived in his skiff with a park nurse, who didn’t have a defibrillator but did have a mobile ECG tester, which kept saying in its mechanical voice “please don’t touch the victim. Testing . . . no pulse. Resume CPR.” The son appeared on the back deck during one of these cycles, and yelled at his dad to let go of his mom. “It doesn’t matter if I die,” said his father. “YES IT DOES!” screamed the boy.

A man arrived who “worked in an ambulance. I’m not a doctor, well, I am, but I’m a psychologist.” A woman, a medic, arrived and managed to get a small bit of steak out. The woman on the phone with 911 announced that an ambulance would be waiting two miles away at Manchester dock, and the ranger let down the bow of his skiff to transfer the victim over. Her husband went with her.

I caught a glimpse of her face as she was moved. She wasn’t alive.

As the skiff left, Laura checked to make sure there were still going to be adults on the boat with the kids, and there were. In the sudden silence, we quietly asked how many kids there were (four—their two children, and two friends), and made sure someone would stay with them, and then the husband of friends rafted on the other side of the boat from where I’d been, who had just arrived for dinner, offered to take us to shore.

Halfway there, a police boat raced by the bay, and caught up with the skiff mid-channel northwest of us, in the path of the setting sun. On shore, Sonja met us with a big hug, and Laura burst into tears. “We can’t stay here,” I said quietly. “Those kids sitting on the bow of their boat . . .”

Maybe 45 minutes later, the man who was not a doctor, well, yes, a psychologist, came putting by in a dinghy. We waded out to him, and he told us that the police boat from Bainbridge had collected a doctor and met the skiff, and they had removed the rest of the steak (why is it always steak?), and restarted her heart. Soon after, the ranger stopped by and confirmed the report, and added that she had blood pressure and was being transferred to the hospital. He took Laura’s name and number, but I doubt if we’ll ever hear more.

I have a lot of thoughts competing for attention—like, how amazing it is that my brother and I had the same childhood and yet my first-hand experience with boats is that there are life-and-death problems on them, and that’s second-hand for him. Or the baffling combination of strength and vulnerability in humans—both the victim, in this case, and those who helped save her life. And fear that she was out too long, that she will never be the same again. And deep sadness that her children, so young, but not young enough to be protected from the knowledge, now understand intimately the fragility of life.

And overall, again, I am reminded of how achingly beautiful consciousness, and experience, and friendship, and love, and nature—and life are. And how precious.

N.B. Laura told me that the instrument the Blake Island nurse brought with her was an AED (automatic external defibrillator). But for some reason--the motion of the boat, the cell phones, or the current state of the woman's heart, it wasn't working.

Kayak Trip 2006: Blake Island (Friday)

note: Please start on Thursday, below.

Friday morning, Deane and I ate some PB&J for energy, hit the water at 6:30 and paddled, against current, back to Vashon to collect the rest of our group, who were racing with that particular early-morning drunken-looking shuffle around the muddy shore, mostly packed up. We dropped off some trash and stuffed more food into our empty boats, trying to be careful not to fill them so far that we wouldn’t be able to get everything in for our homeward paddle Sunday (these boats had, after all, already been stuffed full).

Early morning—like, just after sunrise early—is a magical time to be on the water. The winds haven’t started up for the day yet, and the sea is glassy, clear, and the air is cool. Puget Sound is a beautiful color when it’s not churned up by shipping and industry, like thick sheet glass, the kind that looks green from the end. Our paddles sliced through, green-tinted under the surface. Deeper down, wavelets reflected dappled sunlight on barnacle-encrusted boulders, with sea stars and anemones adding splashes of purple, orange and cream to the wavering underwater scene that you are, nevertheless, careful not to peer too closely at over the edge of your boat. I love kayaking—it makes me feel like a different sort of creature. My habitat is water, not land. I love the alive feeling of my back muscles working with my arms, I love gliding across the shining surface of the sea. When fish jump off your bow, they’re jumping to eye level. When waves hit, you really feel them—little multi-directional ripples plipping against your hull, larger roller-coaster rollers swooping you up and down.

Back at camp, Erik prepared a giant brunch of eggs, potatoes and veggie sausages while the newcomers put up tents, and then we settled all the more securely into summer camping mode. Our sites were on a grassy shore just up from the sand, pebble and driftwood beach, at the foot of a short sandstone cliff and in the shade of several madronas and a couple of firs. We faced west over to the Olympic Mountains (as several sunset pictures from each night attest), about a quarter mile from the bathroom, a little closer to the drinking water (which went from being brown to clear to brown again in an irregular pattern, but which always tasted of iodine). Being right on shore is convenient if you’re a guy, and there were a few we never saw make the bathroom trek the entire weekend (although, for their sake, I hope they had to at least once . . .).

Along on the trip were three little blond teenage girls related to Deane’s wife Erika: her sister and their two first cousins. The three girls look like sisters, and played fetch with each other, and slept for hours on a heap with each other, until I started calling them the Puppies. The three happily shared a tent and an air mattress and only two sleeping bags (“Lauren likes to sleep in the middle,” Jessica told me, “because no one can steal your covers.”)

Deane and Mia and I walked to Tillicum Village to buy briquettes and ice . . . and, okay, chocolate and banana (me) and chocolate and strawberry (Deane) milkshakes. I mean, why not take advantage of all the facilities? I’m not sure what Deane and I were thinking, but we took a paddle and two dry bags along with us to carry home the briquettes balanced between us . . . the briquettes that were sold in five pound volumes . . . and five pounds is five pounds and, well, very light for even one person to carry, no matter how you look at it . . . so we carried the paddle back home again, unused.

Late Friday afternoon, a pirate ship pulled into the harbor and tied up on the linear moorage just offshore. We knew the beautiful old black-hulled wood sailboat was a pirate ship because of the Jolly Rogers—not one, but two—flying in the late afternoon breeze. As the evening progressed, we became more and more convinced that pirates are, in fact, frat boys. Certainly, they have no sense of decency or common courtesy. The noise drifting in to shore became louder as the air grew darker, and our conversation around the small briquette fire became punctuated with distant shouts of “NAKED!!!!” and “BEER BONG! BEEEEER BONNNG!!!!!” To our disbelief, at one point when we were checking them out with our binoculars, someone saw a child on board. Indeed, it wasn’t just frat boys—it was a whole family, and some extra young people, and I mean extra-young, like 8 years old.

Quiet hour came and went amidst screeches and loud music, and people from shore started going out in their dinghies, asking the pirates to please be quiet. Erik, who’d brought his slingshot, starting launching ammo out into the dark. We left a message on the ranger’s phone, and called a friend with Coast Guard ties. Finally I remembered that I had earplugs, and I fell exhausted into bed. The Puppies could sleep through anything.

Deane napping the shade of a madrona on our first day. 

Kayak Trip 2006: Blake Island (Thursday)

note: Due to the long, long nature of this post, I'm breaking it into several parts, more or less by day.

We arrived home, ultimately, Sunday night around 10pm. I was in “keep moving” mode before then, wanting to get as many things done as possible before collapsing into my (mercifully unsandy) bed, so after our long day of loading-paddling-beaching-launching-paddling-beaching-unloading we dropped off the three Seattle-based kayaks we’d rented, then drove out to Maple Valley to pick up our dog, then up to Deane’s to pick up my yellow dry bag of clothes that looked like the yellow dry bags of clothes that the five people currently staying in his and Erika’s house all had, and then, about 10:30, I picked up Us Weekly and did collapse into bed. I didn’t even finish the magazine, and I have to point out, that says something about how tired I was.

Kayak Trip 2006: Blake Island was blissful. As I’ve mentioned here before, I find it increasingly hard to live in Seattle and not own a boat. Fortunately, there are many options for getting out on the water, if you start to dig. It’s moderately easy to find someone to rent you a kayak for a few days. At least in a kayak, you’re in no danger of killing anyone but yourself if you fail to yield right-of-way, and signed releases take care of the company’s legal responsibility in that. There are also multiple tour companies offering kayak adventures. Several of us have taken part in a couple of these—they’re very gourmet, with exotic foods like green curry and smoked salmon omelets cooked for you, and tents provided. They involve quite a bit of paddling in my experience, more than we did this weekend. But, they come with guides. And guides impose an order that may not work very well for any particular group, or rather for all the individuals that make up a group.

So a couple months ago, when Erik brought up the idea of the next kayak trip (I love that there’s always a next one—we’ve hit on a winner as far as group vacations go), I immediately started brainstorming ways we could go without having to follow, well, anyone’s framework but my own.

Erik and his sister Sonja, and me and my brother Deane, all have fond memories from Blake Island, a +/- 480 acre self-contained marine state park in Puget Sound between Vashon and Bainbridge Islands. A quick consultation of Google Earth (the traveler’s best friend) showed Blake to be a mere 2 miles from the Vashon ferry dock, where presumably we could launch some boats. After an arduous couple of weeks collecting data on participant interest and availability, I found an outfit on Vashon willing to rent us the kayaks we needed, minus the three we could conveniently bring from Seattle (we were a large group and they didn’t want to have their entire fleet out on tour during one of their busiest weekends of the summer). They were a bit loath at first, hesitatingly telling me that Blake is very, very popular in the summer and trying to get a first-come/first-serve campsite, let alone three, would be very difficult with a Friday arrival. Okay, I replied, six of us will go Thursday. Eventually they agreed to my plan.

About 10 days before we were scheduled to leave, their accountant emailed and asked what time we’d like to start out on Thursday.

“Well, I have some questions,” I wrote back. “Is there a particular time of day, or time of tide, where the currents would be working in our favor, or at least not working too hard against us? Also, what kind of rescue equipment comes with the boats? Paddle floats? Bilge pumps?”

Evidently, these were the right questions, because my initial contact suddenly came back with a long, friendly email stuffed full of interesting information about the tides and the currents. Such as—Colvos Passage, to the west of Vashon Island between it and the peninsula, virtually always has a northerly current (which means it flows north, sometimes meeting a northerly wind, which blows south. The combination can make for some splashy, choppy, um, exciting waves.), regardless of whether the tide is ebbing or flowing. Also, just off the southeast corner of Blake Island sits a shallow sandbank where tide rips and afternoon winds make for some pretty dicey paddling. AND, it was a new moon yesterday, and so the tides were already particularly exciting over the weekend.

To take advantage of the slackest combination of tide and wind we could find, we all agreed upon a 7:00am launch on Thursday and an 8:00am launch on Friday (which meant, of course, leaving home at 5:00am on Thursday to catch the right ferry, and 6:00am on Friday).

Thursday’s early morning paddle was uneventful. We cut out straight across the ferry lane to Blake, and paddled slowly up the west side looking at the beachside camping. The island was quiet and almost empty, except for several small raccoons eating shellfish in the intertidal zone. Around the north end of the island we decided to land for a short time and first check out the Cascadia Marine Trail sites (for paddlers only, but too exposed for our liking, plus you could see downtown Seattle from them and that made me, at least, feel a bit too close to home—where’s the adventure in being in your own backyard? I’m 33, not 6!), then the west side standard sites. As we were landing we experienced our one and only capsize.

The northwest tip of the island is shallow and sandy, and becomes a huge beach at low tide. The tide was still mostly out, but when a couple boats passed by off shore, the wakes they created sent rollers crashing up the shallows and into our boats (literally into Mario and Laela’s, because Mario’s skirt didn’t fit right), and suddenly I’d tipped into the water. I felt a brief urgency when I didn’t just fall out of my boat, and I was reaching for the release loop on my spray skirt when I suddenly realized I hadn’t fallen out because my arm was resting on sand in six inches of water. I pushed, my boat bobbed upright, and I paddled the last 3 or so feet to shore, laughing hysterically and dripping with 45 degree brine. It turns out that spray skirts=not so effective for keeping out volumes of water, but dry bags=very, very good.

We decided on our three sites (at the north end of the west side, in the madronas) and paid for them, set up camp, found the bathroom (real running water!), and pretty much all dropped off to sleep. The remainder of Thursday we spent hiking around the island, and settling into camp. Mia and I walked to Tillicum Village on the other side to buy fire wood and were told a burn ban had just begun—no burning except briquettes allowed until it rained. Well, no biggy, we’d come and get some of those when we needed them for S’mores. Dinner that night was tofu and veggies in peanut sauce that Deane made. Yum.

And I slept on two mattressess.

My Shadow Riding Shadow's Shadow

 

I Can Only Hope An Actual Bear Would Be Less Scary

Today K&A were gone so I had a housesitting day to myself. Still tired from the 8,000 pounds of hay (of which I probably moved at least 12,000 pounds), I read Harper’s and took a nap on the couch after breakfast and letting the horses out. The dogs napped too, sprawled out on the floor around me. Of course it’s undoubtedly hard work being so consistently underfoot while hay is being unloaded.

After I awoke, I sang through my jazz songs for my next performance (estimating beginning pitches based on how low I think I can sing—note to self: get a pitch pipe, or perfect pitch), then took the opportunity of a length of uninterrupted time to paint a couple watercolors for the new art class I’m taking. It turns out, I’m afraid, that I’m not just a dilettante traveler; I’m just a dilettante. Painting, singing, sewing—how Jane Austen can I get? I mean, I’m also a consummate hostess, a bit of a meddler, funny, and verbose. But enough about me.

Back to me—today Shadow and I went out for a ride, leaving all dogs behind. I like to think of dogs as protection from bears; bears don’t like dogs and keep away from them. But A. also seems to imply that dogs could be bear bait, or at least bear distraction while I’m galloping away. Which would be awful, awful, but probably slightly better than being mauled to death. Anyway, today I didn’t take any dogs because I was going to take a long ride, Shadow likes to run, and Marlee still has a bit of a limp (although it’s much better) and Spackle and Kit are just not that strong anymore.

The first half of the ride was perfect—perfect. Beautiful weather, interested horse, and my thighs and sitz bones had given up hurting because, well, it just wasn’t doing them any good. It’s Sunday so there isn’t any logging activity—which is particularly nice, because there’s going to be a double whammy later this summer with logging taking place on both sides of the Jerome Creek road.

Anyway, about 2/3 of the way through our trip we entered some relative old growth on a steep and narrow downhill trail and I saw, right in the middle of the trail in front of us, human poop. Now, I can say with assurance that there are no human habitations conveniently close to this trail. Furthermore, in my experience, humans generally take cover for such activities. Therefore, question: Do bears shit in the woods? Answer: No. They shit in the middle of the trail.

Immediately I noticed the scat, Shadow started at something off to our right down the hill and sped up her pace. I seated myself more firmly on her bare back, very carefully not looking away down the hill, confident that seeing a bear would not, in fact, allow me to feel more calm and collected as my steed crashed through the underbrush reaching into the trail and stumbled over deadfall not yet cleared from last winter (it’s not that commonly used of a trail—more evidence that humans hadn’t been there pooping). I consciously untensed my muscles while I batted pine branches away from my face, and in a couple minutes we emerged, both of us a bit breathless, near old Jerome City and one of the Gold Hill mines.

Now, I feel like a normal person would have considered this to be a close shave and headed straight home. Shadow certainly would have, but since I was already up there I made her take a detour, through more woods, to check on the huge log I tried to clear last year and failed. She kept flicking her ears at me—Really? We’re not going home? ARE YOU INSANE?—but she didn’t ever bolt.

The log is still there, we backtracked through the woods then headed on home, and we arrived after almost two hours and a fantastic outing. Shadow really is a joy on the trail.

Here’s the thing, though, and if anyone can help me figure this out, I’d appreciate it. I don’t like to be ruled by fear. For example, I’m flying to three different places this summer, and I don’t like the idea. So my feelings, when we saw bear scat and then a half mile later I insisted we continue deeper into the woods instead of hightailing it home, were that I wasn’t going to let a fear of bears keep me from checking on that log when it was convenient to do so. But! How can I tell—how does anyone tell—if my fear of bears is irrational—i.e. the scat was old, the bear’s long gone, he’s not interested in me anyway—and should therefore be challenged; or if my fear is actually a survival instinct, some long-forgotten keep-safe-in-the-wild-world sense—i.e. the bear is just waiting for your horse to slip and you to fall off so he can eat you, gorily and painfully—that I should absolutely listen to?

Was is reasonable for me to continue riding around in the woods, or was it bloody stupid?

After All, This Is What You Asked For

It’s 7:30 in the evening, the sun hasn’t even set (although the house is submerged in a pool of cool dusk), and I’m almost dizzy with exhaustion (and a little with wine). K&A must be made of steel, because 30 minutes ago they took off to drive to Seattle, to attend a family birthday party tomorrow afternoon. They’ll be driving back here tomorrow night. In the last three days we’ve put up almost 8,000 pounds of hay.

Several months ago Ian told me he would be attending a conference in New Orleans from 12-18 July; recently, this seemed to me to be the perfect opportunity to head back to Jerome Creek, this time while K&A were home. I thought that if they were around to deal with attack mares, missing cats, broken gates and escapee neighbor horses, maybe I could slough off some of the emotional scars from my visit in May. “Give me some hard work,” I requested. K took me at my word.

Maybe two years ago, K took advantage of my visit to load some hay into the loft. Horses eat a lot, something like 20 pounds of hay per horse per day in the winter. Fortunately, these horses have close to 80 acres to graze on so they don’t have to be fed hay throughout much of the year. Still, I bucked maybe 40 40-60 pound bales, from the back of the pickup onto the rattling hay elevator. I like bucking hay—it’s hard physical labor, but it’s clean and finite and the hardness is distinctly satisfying.

I suspected, more and more the closer I got to the Palouse this time and the more hay trucks I saw on the roads heading west, that I would be spending at least an hour or two heaving around bales.

Uh, yeah.

So a rundown of my trip to date:

Wednesday: arrive 4:30pm, drop my bags, immediately take Shadow, Spackle and Marlee out for a long ride.

Thursday: up at 7:00 with the dogs (and the gravel trucks racing up the JC road to the Potlatch road because, yes, there’s going to be more logging). Mid-morning, drive to the hay field to load up the truck. Yes, folks, we even picked up our own hay. This involved A. driving the pickup in compound low from bale to bale, me heaving them up (remember, 40-60 pounds) to the tailgate, at least four feet off the ground, and K stacking them in the truck. I think we brought home two loads of about 25 bales each. To unload, A. and I stood in/by the pickup and loaded bales onto the elevator; K stood in the loft and stacked them as they tumbled off. To make our job more interesting, the bales were mostly very poor. That is, the hay is excellent, but the baling was far less than mediocre. We’ve all gotten very good at finessing 50-pound prickly, wiggly, bendy less-than-cubes and only lost maybe 5 (which merely means the hay is already loose, not really lost). Around 4:00 I collected Sikem and went off for a ride with Marlee, checking out the extent to which the beautiful old overgrown logging roads have been graded and widened to make way for dusty clear cuts. In the evening, we had a birthday party for one of the members of On Golden Pond Tours, who were traveling in France and Spain while I was here in May.

Friday: up at 7:00 with the dogs. By 9:00, leaving to load more hay, this time with a flatbed trailer. A., to get her exercise, loaded from the field onto the trailer while I drove and K stacked; we then unhooked the trailer and loaded the pickup (A. driving again). We then unloaded the pickup, then loaded it again, then unloaded, then had lunch, then loaded again and unloaded, then loaded and collected the trailer, then came home (there may have been one fewer loading and unloading . . . but really, by this time it had become a way of life. Another form of breathing. Something you ceased to notice except by its absence). A. went off to work at the Palouse library for a few hours, K had a meeting, I took Toby and Spackle and Kit (Marlee is a little limpy in her left front foot) for a ride. I arrived home about the same time K did and we unloaded the trailer and the pickup (with a bit of help from G&N from up the road). We three ate leftovers, salads with steak (them) and halibut (me).

Saturday: Today I was up at 6:30 because A. and I had riding lessons; we hauled Sikem into Moscow and I had a one-hour flat lesson on him, then A. had a lesson on a borrowed horse. Back home, we exchanged trailers and hitches and trekked off for our final load—both trailer and pickup—of hay. And then we brought it home and unloaded it. As we were finishing up a pickup full of people—two in the front, two in the king-cab back, and maybe five or so in the bed—pulled into the yard and a group of old friends of K&A, aged 1 ½ to 50, all related somehow, spilled out and spent the next hour or so milling about playing fetch with the dogs, petting the horses, sinking into the pond on the “boat”, and discussing the aerial photo of the place that Ian got made last year.

And now I am tired. And K, just turned 65, was the one who handled every last bale at least twice. I only handled most of them twice.

Now, when I come out here where people don’t “exercise” because it turns out they never actually stop, I feel silly about my Pilates and my membership to the rock climbing gym where all I ever do is bouldering. But the fact is, I was remarkably well set up for three days of this hard work—which, I might add, mostly took place in the hot (86-90 degree) sun. My arms are sore (my left arm in particular, which is evidently the weak King John to my right arm's Richard the Lionhearted), but less sore than yesterday (a remarkable thing about the human body—the incredible speed at which strength can be built). And my hands aren’t blistered—in fact, my rock climbing calluses are fortified (I did wear gloves--I'm a tomboy but not delusional). And the rest of me feels great—no joint aches, no nerve twinges, and my lower back and wrist stiffnesses are gone. So, I think I’ll keep up with my exercise routines for the time being—at the very least, so I’m prepared to do Orcas the real way—including bucking hay.

NB--for all you machinists out there, a reader pointed out that it's "compound low," not "compact low." More evidence of extreme exhaustion and a tired personal editor. Thanks, Joel!

Okay, Fine, Not All Camping is Hardship

Case in point: Fourth of July Weekend, 2006 on Lopez Island

Highlights:

1. Camp location. Three sites at Odlin County Park, the three best sites, a little bit in the trees, and with immediate water access. It actually sucked to wake up in my own bed on the 6^th and not be able to go directly out to the beach.

2. Boats. One 10 ft. handmade sailboat, two single kayaks and one double, one inflatable with a 6-horse outboard.

3. Food. Gourmet, if I do say so myself. Herbed turkey burgers. Banana pancakes. Fresh-caught crab. Roasted corn on the cob. Breakfast burritos. Hand-picked blueberries. Steaks, or veggies sausages. Fresh biscuits. Cucumber salad. S’mores (hello, of course).

4. Drink. Copious.

5. Weather. Hot and sunny during the days, dry and cold at night. And therefore

6. Sleeping accommodations. Two 3-inch-think foam pads borrowed from my mother, with our two giant cotton-flannel-lined sleeping bags spread on top to make a double bed, in which we slept swathed in fleece so we were warm and unbelievably comfortable.

7. Fun. Badminton, wading, lounging on the beach, trips to town and buying ice cream, jumping off the dock into 52 degree water, Booze Cruises, fireworks, group hikes, fire poi. The Sun Shower to rinse off (but not actually shower with soap. Please. We’re camping.).

Lowlights:
1. None, really, even including waiting 5 ½ hours for the ferry on Wednesday, because we got to have ice cream again.

One of Life’s Perfect Moments

We went up to Orcas Island on Saturday to camp overnight and maybe do some work. I had big plans—dig out the fire pit until it was the island-safe six feet in diameter and pave it with cement bricks; clear more area in the willow copse and build shady rustic stairs with some of the boulders strewn around the base of the trunks; water and prune and generally care for the plantings we put in last fall. I was tired, though, presumably from the oceans of stress hormones I’d been bathing in for weeks, and so was easily convinced that the current fire pit, once the thistles and snake were removed (me: “ A SNAKE!” Ian: “Is it a garter snake?” me: “Uh . . . it’s brown.” Ian: “It’s a brown garter snake.” Me: “There aren’t poisonous snakes here, are there?” Our friend Erik: “Not native ones.” ha ha, Erik. Me for the next ten minutes: “Oh! Was that a snake? Aagh! Was that a snake?”), was entirely safe enough for our purposes.

Late in the afternoon, having leaned over our deer cages to water the plants (instead of the infinitely more laborious removing of the deer cages to water the plants) and having recovered from the snake scare, we three humans and our two dogs hopped into the 4-Runner and drove up to the north end of the property, to see about clearing space in the copse. Throughout the afternoon Ian and Erik had been discussing, considering that we didn’t have refrigeration yet, nor ice, the most effective way to cool three of the pounders of Rainier Ale we had stored in the outhouse. Each can in a wet sock, held in a breeze (i.e. from the motion of the car) was deemed to be the most effective way, using the magical powers of evaporation. Ian duly sacrificed three of his socks (the clean ones) to the cause and we bounced slowly away over deceptively lumpy ground and through five-foot-tall grasses, almost running over a young buck that apparently assumed, until the 4-Runner was breathing down his back, that if he just lay still we wouldn’t see him. Well, it’s true, we didn’t. In the nick of time, he leapt up from under our right front bumper and vaulted away over the grass. We pulled up by our pear tree, absolutely laden with pears after the rudimentary pruning we gave it last fall.

As I roamed around marveling at the fruit (a plum tree was also bearing, evidently also due to our bumbling attempts at plant husbandry), Ian managed to sneak into the copse and thus set up my Perfect Moment.

And here is where I’ll, for only the space of a few lines, lapse into full-on travel blogger descriptive language ridiculousness.

When I arrived in the center of the copse, having pushed my way through sun-warmed Vitamin C-and-rose-scented clinging vines, Ian was standing next to our hammock, which he’d smuggled up from Seattle and strung in the dappled shade between two old willow trunks. “Here, sweetie-pie, do you want to try it out?” he asked. Uh, hello! Yes! All thought of heavy labor, of clearing brush and building boulder staircases, fled from my mind.

I climbed into the hammock, lay back, and felt myself—body, mind and soul—ease into bliss, a fear-free bliss I hadn’t felt in a long time. Fresh green leaves trembled in the breeze above my head, irregularly framing a cerulean sky. The temperature was perfect—not a hint of hot nor cold. The hammock, a brightly-colored, tightly-woven one Ian had brought from Brazil three years ago, supported my body completely and gently—no rope mesh digging into my tender flesh. I lay there in a pool of shade in a lambent afternoon, surrounded by love, surrounded by peace, surrounded by quiet land and birdsong, in a bit of nature that I have somehow had the extraordinary good fortune to call my own.

And then someone handed me a—well, if not perfectly chilled, at least somewhat less warm than the afternoon—can of stale Rainier Ale, and my satisfaction was complete.

And Just Like That . . .

I’m done. Today was supposed to be a long day—my last long day of cancer treatment. I was supposed to be at the clinic from, essentially, 10:30 am to 7:00 pm (with a lunch break, of course). I’ve been going to the clinic for five years now; every week for the first six months, and every three weeks for the past 4 ½ years. That’s a long time. In fact, it’s a longer amount of time than Ian and I have been married. It’s more time than Spackle, our dog, has been alive. It’s more time than I spent in college, almost (but not quite) counting my MA. It’s half a decade. I’ve been in treatment in two decades in my life—my twenties and my thirties. In fact, if you count my first round of cancer treatments, which, to my utter disbelief and bafflement, started in 1999 when I was twenty-six, well then, my time in treatment has spanned two millennia.

And now it’s done. After a fitful night of sleep, I awoke this morning, attempted (badly) the Thursday New York Times crossword puzzle, and then restlessly roamed the house waiting for 10:10 when I could leave to get to my blood drawn. Ian came in at one point and suggested something, I don’t know what, and I lashed out at him, tears in my eyes. “I’m going to be a little snappy today,” I told him unnecessarily.

At 10:30 at the clinic I had an IV poked into my left forearm and blood drawn. An hour later, after Ian had met me in a waiting room, and we’d sat around well, waiting, me with my heart in my throat, the proverbial weight on my chest, making it hard to breathe normally so that I occasionally took a giant conscious breath, I finally got in for my chest CT. As soon as I was done, we rushed off, ignoring the request that I stay around 10 minutes in case I developed a reaction to the radioactive iodine. Well, I had developed a reaction, and it told me to get the hell out of that clinic, at least for a while.

I felt like a bug put in a jar by a benevolent but clueless giant. There were airholes, but all around me I was bumping against invisible barriers between me and the life I wanted to lead, and I’d been in the jar for five years. For the last several weeks my feelings have been an exhausting mixture of euphoria and dread—when I reached the 22^nd of June, I’d be set free! But what if that killed me? What if I couldn’t go it alone? But what if I didn’t have the chance to be set free, anyway? Maybe the cancer had come back in the last few months since my last meeting with the doctor. But maybe I’d just be free—free to travel when I wanted to, instead of planning out, months in advance, trips that would fit within my three week grid. Free to rock climb any day I wanted, instead of having to wait 4 days after every infusion until my body expelled the extra saline and my fingers returned to normal size, and didn’t feel like popping when I hauled myself up walls. Free to feel like any other healthy 33-year-old.

At 1:00 pm, Dr Livingston would let me know.

We had an hour to kill, so Ian and I went to lunch, meeting Mom, at a lovely Italian place called Serafina, 3 minutes from the clinic. I think I behaved moderately respectably; I hadn’t been able to eat anything in the morning, but I knew my tenuous hold on my composure would become nonexistent if I met the doctor on an entirely empty stomach, no matter what the news. So I ate, excellent bread and olive oil and salt, ravioli with ricotta and pine nuts, a cup of decaf. A salad. I think my table manners were passable; it’s a nice restaurant and our server (who, albeit, had dreadlocks) never looked at me askance. I probably behaved okay, although I felt, dimly, that I was stuffing bread into my mouth as if I hadn’t had a meal in days.

And then it was time to go, and within minutes we were at the clinic, then I was getting weighed (even in the throws of almost blinding anxiety I was able to joke about taking off my flip flops because they’d add so many significant ounces to the never acceptable total), then they took my blood pressure, my temperature, checked my pulse, and suddenly the doctor was there.

“You look fine,” he said. “Your CT is normal.”

And I burst into tears.

He comforted me, then left while I got undressed for the physical part of the exam; when that was done, we sat around and talked. About birth control (not the Pill; barrier methods). About nutrition (“Your brain needs sugar. Your heart needs sugar.”). About alcohol (“There seems to be legitimate evidence supporting the use of alcohol for heart health”). About the fact that Dr Livingston is leaving, moving to Tucson in August (“You stayed around just long enough to make sure I’d be alright, right?” “Of course I did,” smiling at me).

Finally, he stood up. “Are you accessed?” he asked, wondering if I had an IV in my port.

“No, I’m not,” I said.

“Well, then, you’re free to go home!”

I stared blankly for a minute. “Um . . . I’m not going to get the last infusion?”

“Well, why bother?” he asked. “Of course, you can always go up and say goodbye to the nurses. I’ll send someone up to tell them you won’t be having your infusion.” Then, smiling, he gave me a big hug.

A little dazed, Ian and I made our way up to the fifth floor, where my nurse for the day, who had given me the IV and blood draw in the morning and had waited for hours to give me my last infusion, insisted on flushing my port anyway (I’m going to keep it for the time being; and it needs to be flushed every 4 weeks—but that’s flexible!—to make sure blood clots don’t form), and when she was done and we pulled back our curtain, a choir of nurses flung a pink and silver feather boa around my neck and sang a “You’ve finished chemo!” song that someone wrote. Ian teared up, and I teared up, and then they took pictures of us, and then the song finished and everyone cheered, including the lady in the infusion chair next to me.

And I hugged everyone and walked out with Ian, feeling much the way I did upon arrival in SeaTac last December after the ten hours of trans-Pacific turbulence hell, namely, a sort of grateful—and yes, euphoric—disbelief that I am still alive.

I’m very much looking forward to living the rest of my life outside the jar.

A Day Out of the Past

I grew up in King County, and from the time I was a toddler, my family had boats. The first was an 18-foot Larson bowrider ski boat that my dad and my uncle bought together. Every summer for a few years, we rented a cabin on Shoal Bay on the north end of Lopez Island, hauled the boat up, and for a month a parade of aunts and uncles and cousins tramped through, clamming, crabbing, and whizzing with us around the 450 or so San Juan Islands.

When I was a little older, maybe nine, we bought a new boat, a 26-foot Fiberform cabin cruiser that “slept five” (or would’ve if we’d all been between the ages of seven and nine like me and Deane. But it did sleep the four of us more or less comfortably). We named it the Rusty Duck, after a restaurant in Edmonds that went out of business soon after (a coincidence I’m sure). The Rusty Duck had, as a tender, an 8-foot Livingston dinghy with the sail package—center board, rudder, and small triangular red, white and blue-striped sail. In a fit of 9-year-old inspiration I suggested calling it the Rusty Duckling (or Deane did?) and it was so baptized.

In 8^th or 9^th grade, we upgraded again, to the Finnish Maiden (named by the previous owners) a 36-foot aft cab Uniflite which slept, comfortably, six, and had all the accoutrements of luxury—two showers with hot water, flushing toilets (after a fashion), blender, wet bar, and an 11-foot Boston Whaler dinghy , the Flying Viking, Coast Guard approved for a 10-horse outboard, but outfitted with a 35, which gave it enough power to pull a water skier. Yeah, we kids, and our friends Sonja and Erik, and I daresay my dad, and even frequently my mom (when she wasn’t worried about kids capsizing, anchors drifting in the night, and the cost of fuel) were in heaven.

After my father passed away in 1992, we sold the Finnish Maiden and for the last 14 years my trips on private boats have been achingly few and far between.

It’s torture living six blocks from Lake Union, having the skill, the desire, and even, if I were to so choose, the money to own a boat, and not having one. The reason I don’t is that I’m just barely too practical. The 4-Runner could, if necessary, tow a ski boat, but we really have no place to park it. Moorage is possible to secure, but it’s $300 per month on Lake Union, and, frankly, I know I couldn’t possibly use the boat enough to justify that. Larger boats cost more for fuel and moorage and, really, are RVs on the water . . . and I’m only 33. And so, I’m boatless.
But yesterday I was invited to help move a boat—a 32-foot Bayliner—from a yacht brokerage on Lake Union to one in La Conner. A friend of ours is selling it . . . and about six hours in, by the time we were nearing Oak Harbor, I was almost convinced I needed to buy it.

From start to finish it was a true Northwest boating experience, minus any of the trouble like blowers that don’t work, bumpers falling overboard without being tied on or fishing line getting tangled in the props. We went through the Ship Canal, we crowded into the small locks with two other boats and slowly bobbed down to sea level (and much to my relief, the lock operators didn’t yell at me; they were only mildly condescending when I passed the 50-foot bow line under the rail the wrong way, then tangled it up trying to undo my error). We stopped for fuel in Shilshole and I got to jump for the dock, then we stopped for fuel again in Edmonds and again I got to jump for the dock (the pump moving gasoline from the shore to the dock having broken down in Shilshole). We looked at charts to make sure we went between Whidbey and Camano Islands (D: “This is my least favorite stretch of water in Puget Sound.” Me: “Because it looks like suburbia.” D: “You’re right! It’s the 405 of Puget Sound!”) instead of between Camano and the shore—a big, long, inconvenient dead end. It was a little rainy for a while, a little gray, a little sunny. We drove from the fly bridge, and from the cabin. The water was almost calm, no whitecaps, barely even any swells from shipping. We saw a bald eagle and many seals. We drank beer and wine and water, we ate chips and cheese and Pirate’s Booty (for the nautical flavor) and sang along with Dire Straits.

And today, I was back to my tortured, humdrum existence with no boat.

A Toast to Friendship

For twelve years now, since 1994 (with a trip in 1991 that we call “The Pilot”), my college girlfriends and I have been spending Memorial Day Weekend together. The first few years were all on the Oregon coast (we went to Lewis and Clark), and included many people—both boys and girls—besides the core group. The first year we brought—and finished—a keg, and we had to (had to!) buy more beer. Since then, the amount of alcohol intake has gone steadily down (although we still drink more beer than during, say, an average three-day period), and the quality (and quantity I daresay) of food intake has gone exponentially up—including not just chips and salsa and a large pan of lasagna and Tootsie Pops, but gourmet made-from-scratch mac and cheese with greens, grilled salmon and veggies and chicken, breakfast casserole and fruit salad, homemade split pea soup and black bean-rice salad, homemade apple pies and lemon pound cake . . . and the list goes on.

A few years after college, most of us had left Portland and scattered ourselves around the US, so we started scattering our Memorial Day Weekend trips too, and reduced participants to the current seven. We went to New York City a couple times, Las Vegas (no one lives there, but you gotta do it once), Arizona (a mountainy part), Lake Michigan, Point Reyes, Seattle. We have one main rule, namely, everyone has to be able to come. About five years back this meant that we actually celebrated over a weekend in June, but celebrate we did. It just wouldn’t be the same without the seven.

This year we returned to Lincoln City for the first time since 1997, which meant that Laura and I didn’t have to fly anywhere—which, for reasons I’ve gone into before, made me very, very happy. Still, it meant that after six hours of driving from Jerome Creek to Seattle and one hour at home, I had another six hours mostly in the car (traffic traffic) until we reached the Portland airport and met everyone/collected arriving out-of-towners, and it was midnight before I was bedded down on my couch. By the next afternoon when we’d driven another few hours and arrived safely at our beachside rental, I was exhausted.

Part of my exhaustion was, of course, simply the fact of 15 hours of alert travel the day before, but that wasn’t all.

In the past when I’ve taken care of Jerome Creek, it’s been almost exclusively idyllic—in fact, the spare peppering of “incidents”—i.e. a corral rail that needs a nail, a tumble off the side of a horse into soft bushes—make the trip all the more perfect because I’ve been given a few minor ways to practice my problem solving. I’m also usually alone much of the time, so I have plenty of space to recharge my social batteries and putter around writing.

This time, I had only three days alone out of 15; many, many “incidents” cropped up day after day; and I started my country idyll already drained—dear friends have been going through a separation, and it’s been very, very difficult for everyone involved, which of course is not just the couple in question.

So by the time we arrived at our beach house and unpacked the cars, all I could imagine doing was lying down and taking a nap. I don’t sleep easily, however, and I couldn’t sleep then. I lay on my back in the blue and white room, listening to the crash of the waves, tears leaking out of my eyes, thinking over and over about attacked horses, dog fights, divorce, and the end of cancer treatments, trying to calm my mind, trying to get some rest. Finally, I gave up. I can promise to be a safe driver, I thought to myself, but I don’t have the energy to be anything more this year. I got up and wiped my face, went downstairs and curled up in the corner of the couch at the other end from Lee, across from Laura on the other couch.

“How are you, Ducky?” said Lee.

“Okay,” I responded, hugging my knees into my chest. It was all I could say.

“Did you sleep?” asked Laura.

“No, not at all.”

Lee looked at me carefully. “Would you like a backrub?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” I said, starting to tear up.

“Can I get you a beer?” Laura asked, standing up.

“That would be great.”

And there you have it, folks. I was at the end of my rope, and they saw that, and they didn’t just pull me back in; they came out to get me. I didn’t have to say that I only had the strength left to not commit vehicular homicide; that I couldn’t be counted on to counsel anyone through their current challenges, that I didn’t have the wherewithal to cook a meal, or really even to clean up after one. They knew because they love me.

I didn’t have to say anything at all.

Jerome Creek Wrap-Up

These “last things” entries are always longer than I expect them to be, and this one will be no different, I’m sure. And so, diving in:

Doucely. Doucely, it turns out, was never gone. Well, she may have been gone for a couple days because I definitely went to the loft more than once and didn’t see her, but she returned and it was definitely her. When A. called from Barcelona the day before I left, I cleared up the two main mysteries, namely 1) Doucely is a small, black cat. 2) She has never worn a collar. I have no more information about gray cats or collared cats. I suspect that my own personal memory of petting a collared cat was merely my brain retrofitting Doucely with a collar when circumstances led me to believe she’d had one.

Toby. Toby is fine, and will be ready to ride any day now (in fact, has maybe been ridden already). Shadow has attacked her before in close quarters, long ago. A. very kindly comforted me with a bit of advice from her vet, shared long ago when Shadow had bullied Toby up a bulkhead and scraped all the hair of Toby’s legs—“They are independent creatures, and try as you might, you cannot always control everything they do.” Too true. Oh, too true.

Janet. Janet is fine as well, none the worse for wear from her fall. In fact, the morning after, as she was packing up to go, she kept swinging her arms and saying “I’m euphoric! I can’t believe I was ever scared of accidents! This was great! I can’t wait to tell everyone at co-housing!” And, to answer the obvious question, no, she had not fallen on her head.

Me. I, too, am physically more or less fine. I have an appointment with a body worker next week to work out the remaining spine-crushing (metaphorically speaking of course) kinks from my fall, undoubtedly exacerbated by the 2,000 miles I put on my car in 17 days. That makes me sound crippled and really I’m not.

Until next time . . . I remember something more to write about, that is.

Two experiences which, together, reminded me that my bright ideas don’t always translate into good animal behaviors

The last full day that I was in Idaho, I brought out the three pieces of rawhide I’d been saving up for the three dogs, and distributed them, one to each, which is fair. Of course the dogs all wanted each others rawhide, and the tenuous truce established between Kit and Loper wore to a ragged thread that I, unfortunately, didn’t notice until Kit cornered Loper in Sikem’s stall, which had only one exit, and proceeded to attack him, snarling and screeching and baring his teeth and biting. I threw a horse brush into the fray, which did a total of no good at all, then ran in kicking indiscriminately. I caught Kit in the flank, which surprised him enough to let Loper go, and Loper high-tailed it out of there (actually, Loper, like most dogs, slunk away, tail between his legs. The phrase “high-tailed it” could refer to the local deer, however, who do leap away with their enormous fluffy brush tails pointing straight up). I marched up to Kit and got down in his face and said “NO. You know that’s NOT OKAY,” and he looked up at me defiantly and he growled at me. Boy was I not going to stand for that, not even for an instant. I grabbed him by the collar and marched him to the porch and made him lie on his bed, and I left him in time out for about ten minutes, while I collected the rawhides I could find and put them safely out of reach. The next morning when dogs, people and horses were wandering around outside, I heard a low growl and looked over to see Kit with the rawhide I hadn’t been able to find. I strode over and took it from him—he did not argue—and put it out of reach. The dogs were perfectly fine from then on, even in the car for the six hours until I dropped off Loper.

The evening after my first riding lesson I thought, instead of taking a long ride around the area, I’d bridle Shadow in the pasture and just meander around there a bit, before catching the other horses and bringing everyone down to bed. Knowing that, if I didn’t come up with something more enticing than carrots, she’d just run down the hill and leave me to carry both the halter and the bridle down myself, I put some grain in a small bucket and took that with me up the hill.

First problem—it’s hard to halter one horse when she and two others all have their heads deep in the bucket of grain you’re holding over your arm. Still, I managed to grab Shadow, who knew what I was up to but still couldn’t resist the siren song of that sweet, nutty grain. She was moderately surprised when I quickly picked her hooves, exchanged halter for bridle, and hopped on, but she was willing enough to canter around a bit. Toby eventually flung the empty grain bucket, in a huff, away from her, and she and Sikem drifted back up toward the baby trees where they’d been grazing before I lured Shadow in.

After about 30 minutes I’d had enough and decided to catch Sikem, who I would lead while riding Shadow, trusting Toby to follow. And then I realized, yeah, there wasn’t any grain left. Or carrots, or anything but me, and I know from experience that I’m only interesting when I’m letting the horses out. I rode Shadow down to where I’d left the halter and the bucket, led her over to a pile of logs so I could jump on easier, and made my one good move of the afternoon: I carefully placed the bucket on a tall round of firewood so that, did I manage to collect Sikem, I could then collect the bucket without having to get off the horse.

So, holding Sikem’s halter in one hand and my reins in the other, I rode up the hill. Of course, as soon as I hopped off by Sikem and Toby, they turned away, just barely fast enough that I didn’t stand a chance of catching them. I sighed, jumped back on Shadow, and headed back down the hill, suddenly wondering how I was going to carry bucket and halter and reins and how, in fact, I had meant to lead a horse and carry a bucket and hold my reins, all bareback.

When I reached the bucket, I leaned over and dropped the halter in, then picked up the bucket. I gave an experimental shake—yes, to my ears, the buckles on the halter sounded more or less like grain swirling in the bucket. Maybe this would still work, and I would not find myself trudging back up the hill for the other horses once I’d deposited Shadow in her stall.

Shaking the bucket, I rode Shadow off down the hill toward home. I glanced back hopefully once or twice, but Toby and Sikem continued to graze, unperturbed, ignoring me as I rode away. Ah well. We dropped down out of view and continued along.

Suddenly, I heard a deep, quiet thunder. I turned to look over my shoulder. Nothing. The thunder grew louder, and became clear—galloping hooves. I glanced over my shoulder again, and saw Sikem and Toby cresting the hill, running flat out after me. Shadow tensed up, flicked an ear at me can I run too? I kept my seat loose, calm, and tapped the reins. No, not right now. Not with the bucket!. Sikem pulled abreast of us and slowed down to a wiggly trot, and immediately tried to stick his head in the bucket. Of course he did, because he thought it was full of grain. Shadow danced around, I gripped with my legs and shooed Sikem away, and eventually made it to the corrals without further incident, and Sikem and Toby didn’t race back up the hill and were easy to catch.

Which, I agree, makes for a rather mundane ending to a story, but with all the other drama going on, I was happy to be able to learn a lesson—i.e. think things through from the horse perspective if you intend to include horses in your plans—without danger to life, limb, or liberty (mine, that is).