Raven and Sparrow

What the...snow?

After an unusually cold February including a week of snow (we got about 4 inches here on the island, but my family got almost a foot in Seattle and my son over two in the Cascade Mountain foothills) we were thinking we had had winter and were looking forward to spring. Today the forecast called for rain but it has been snowing all day. Its not sticking very much, but still. Many winters have no snow at all, so this seems like overkill. (I know, I know....... all of you in hard winter areas can call me a snowflake.)

The element of surprise today takes me back so clearly to childhood. I grew up on this same island and in those days (dinosaurs had just disappeared) weather forecasting was much less accurate. The mountains of the Olympic Peninsula on the western edge of Washington State protect Puget Sound from the fury of the open ocean, but they split and twirl the air streams that flow over them, resulting in highly various weathers on this side. Before satellite imaging meteorologists could see the big fronts coming from the west or the north, but had no idea how they would affect any given area in the Sound. They gave percentage possibilities for precipitation but we knew it was guesswork and could not depend upon them to make plans. Mostly, weather was just what it was where you were, a daily surprise. The best surprise was snow, of course because it was so unusual, and meant a break from school. I remember dragging myself out of bed in the darkness of winter, expecting to go through the usual morning motions, dreading my scheduled arithmetic test, when my mother threw open the drapes and the transformed world announced a holiday. Oh happy snow! 

Now the forecasters have so many more tools to work with that our weather is much less mysterious. We get updates on our phones that tell us to expect rain at four o'clock and nervously warn us of approaching snow possibilities. It is better in many ways but sometimes I miss the blessing of unexpected delight.

Beach in winter

On New Year's Eve we joined our friends at their cabin on Whidbey Island, a place firmly embedded in our history together. We got there in time for a beach walk before dark on a gorgeous winter day. We visited my favorite cliff and found it much eroded but still beautiful. The cliffs along this beach have been crumbling for as long as we have been coming here, but now they are positively melting.

Logan had his usual fun time chasing sticks....

.....and swimming after loons ever further out into the sound. They finally dove and allowed him to give up the chase. 

It was a lovely end to the year.

 

Whitecaps

Our warm, sunny Indian summer came to an end a couple of weeks ago and the rains have returned. After a few gray, misty days we woke this morning to sunshine and brisk winds that stirred the waters of the Salish Sea to action. We took the dog down to the rocks and braced ourselves against the blow. No bats in our belfries now!

See the eagle above the island? They have returned from their late summer vacations and are numerous and active here again. 

The sun is very low on the horizon already and we still have two months to go to the solstice. Down into darkness we go, but mornings like this gladden the heart.

 

Geese flying south

Another small dinner....just four of us. I think six or eight people are the best number for a dinner party, but lately for me it has been four or twelve. Oh well. Each occasion has its own combinations and rhythms. This one brought to us friends that live close by, but have been drawn up into their own lives for the past few months and have been therefore little seen. It was good to reconnect. The food turned out particularly well this time...flank steak tournados (spinners), roasted red potatoes, fresh green beans with bacon, and green salad...yum.

Since it was the first day of October I wanted the table to reflect the onset of autumn. I thought I might use the spider web runner, but then a flock of geese flew over, heading south, and I switched to the square tablecloth with the circling swans. The last farmers' market of the year yielded a beautiful bouquet of dahlias, zinnias and hypericum berries in fall colors, with a zing of hot pink and chartreuse to enliven the combination. They fit into my little iron cauldron very well. The square yellow Vietri plates that I rarely get to use looked best, and the green glasses that I used on my last summer table. Just-starting-to-turn finely articulated leaves from our Japanese maple tree paired with hypericum berries linked the plates with the dark kettle and the brown flowers in the bouquet. I felt like this setting expressed the moment in the wheeling season as well as it could and was satisfied with that.

 

Bountiful beach

The weather forecast said summer was over, but we went to the beach anyway because it was low tide. My parent's property on Hood Canal includes oyster and clam rights on a private beach. There is a saying around here that when the tide is low the table is set and that was true for us this weekend. The rain ceased just as the tide dropped and we sallied forth with buckets and rakes to gather our limits of bivalves. The oysters just sit on the sand waiting to be picked up but the clams need digging, or at least scratching. The mud is a little daunting on a minus tide and Mike almost had to leave his boots in it, but Brendan came to the rescue. We filled our buckets in short order and retired to the campfire to enjoy the bounty. Michele and Becca are fans of shellfish and led the dining charge. We ate a couple oysters raw (my favorite) and steamed many more over the fire. Melted butter, garlic and wine make a fine sauce. Summer lingered long enough for us to have a great family weekend.

Water dog

We spent a couple of days with my family at my parent's camp over on Hood Canal. It isn't really a canal at all, its a fjord...a long glacier-dug arm of Puget Sound. Although it is close in miles to the urban crowds it is relatively hard to get to and feels a million miles away. Mom and Dad's place is close to the mouth of one of the many little rivers that leap straight down from the Olympic Mountain summits above to the salt water below, with no time to pool or gather tributaries. As you travel along the shoreline about every five miles you cross another river....the Quilcene, the Dosewallips, the Duckabush.... these are famous salmon-producing streams and are mostly still wild and free. We took a hike to one of the many waterfalls in the area and found that the National Forest begins about three miles upriver from the camp. It feels like the edge of the wilderness.

 At this time of year there are quieter stretches of water as the river approaches its end. Logan had a wonderful time fetching sticks in the clear clean water. He is undeniably a water dog.

 

Orca!

We were soaking up the surprise sunshine on Sunday, eating our lunch on the patio, when Brendan caught a glimpse of a dorsal fin. We abandoned our food and rushed down to the rocks in time to see and hear a pod of orca as they rose for air. It has been at least two years since I have seen them from our property. The three resident pods usually hang out in the Haro Straights between Vancouver Island and the San Juans. We are southeast of that, and although our neighbors say they used to come here frequently, now their visits are rare. If we see them we drop everything to watch. 

Unfortunately they are difficult to photograph because by the time you see them through the lens they are already going down. At times three or four were at the surface at once, including a mom and baby. The sound of their blowing carries a long way over the water.

Seeing orca made a beautiful day even more special. After lunch we went across Deception Pass to the north shore of Whidbey Island to walk along the beach. Sometimes life is just so hard.

 

 

 

Waiting for the big one

The Pacific Northwest is a benign place where the weather rarely goes to extremes. Our beautiful inland sea protects us from the furies of the ocean and mitigates the harshest swings of seasonal temperature. We don't have searing heat and humidity in the summer, we don't have sub-zero cold or often even snow in the winter. Sometimes the winds will howl, but typhoons are scarce. The threat of rain is frequent, but hardly dangerous. The only thing that prevents us from relaxing completely in our Garden of Eden is the earth itself. Being on the edge of a tectonic plate means we are subject to the same quake/volcano/tsunami possibilities as Japan, Indonesia, Chile  and the other countries of the Pacific Rim. The geologic record suggests a pattern of major earthquakes every three hundred years and we are past due. Our portion of the fault-line running up the west coast is locked right now so the prediction is for the next quake to be a doozy....around 9 on the Richter scale. Of course no one really knows what or when it will happen, just that something will. Eventually.

I think of this every time we visit our friends' cabin on Whidbey Island, which they have been generously sharing with us and many others for thirty years.  The cabin was built in the thirties and was a modest one from the beginning, but its location directly on the beach just at the point where no-bank gives way to cliffs makes it the perfect jumping off point for hours of private beach walking. I always try to visit my favorite cliff sometime during our stay. It is a low one as cliffs go, but shows unmistakably how the sea bed reared up towards the sky in some long distant cataclysm. The sharp line angling through the middle is said to be the mark of the last great quake. I don't know about that for sure, but it seems clear that something happened suddenly. The quality of the clay below the line is quite different from that above. The effects of erosion on this bank, with its subtle coloration and textural contrasts never fail to touch me, or let me go without a sense of warning.

This time it occurred to me that the big earthquake isn't the only scary thing hanging over my head. I realized that I have been waiting for the end of the world all my life. I was sent home in grade school during the Cuban missile crisis because everyone feared nuclear annihilation...maybe that day...and the fact that nothing actually happened did not rid me of the fear that it would. The nuclear danger has seemed to ease in recent years, but I know the possibility still lurks in all the fissile material swirling through the hands of very angry people. Still, I'm not fretting so much about atomic bombs these days, but more about climate change and the breakdown of the economy and the government. The Wall Street collapse of 2008 was a very close thing and nothing has been done to prevent another one. Apparently nothing can be done because the government isn't working anymore. If even modest gun control legislation is impossible in the face of endless mass shootings and the will of over 80% of the voters, how will economic reform or climate change be addressed in any useful way? It feels like being tied to the tracks waiting for the approach of a slowly moving freight train. The Big One. 

Judging by the number of movies lately that have featured ruined post-apocalyptic cities, I'm not alone in my disquiet but the only remedies seem to be local ones. We can affect the world immediately around us even if the larger world is out of our control. It is still possible to join with our families and friends around the table and make the connections that sustain us. I just think we need to expand our definitions of who constitutes family and friends.

 

Hummingbird heaven

This is hummingbird time. From March until June our feeder is mobbed every day. At first we get mostly migratory birds....... black-throated and rufous hummers...but now it is all our native year-round Anna's hummingbirds. They are the smallest but feisty as can be. Usually one will try to monopolize the feeder and scare everyone else away, but in the spring there are so many that would-be tyrants are overwhelmed. We were pleased to find a nest along our beach trail this year, right at eye level. Whenever the mom is on the nest we go way around, but lately she has been out at walk time and Mike got some great shots of the babies. It never gets old.

Again with the tulips

It has been one year exactly since my sisters, my mom and I met in the tulip fields of Skagit Valley for our annual smack of color. This year we pulled it together at the last minute, goaded by the forecast of sunny weather. It has been highly variable weather-wise for the last week...my sister Erin was caught by a blizzard coming over the mountains on Easter....so the promise of sunshine was too good to pass up. We weren't the only ones to leap into action. The crowds were larger than I have ever seen on a weekday for tulip gazing, but they weren't thick enough to spoil the intense beauty of fields of light-filled flower goblets. It never gets old. Last year was chilly, but it was in the sixties today, making March 31 the perfect choice for our outing.