For this islander, October has its surprises

He cleans up pretty well sometimes: Your correspondent in mail-order tux, with daughter Lillian at the Thornewood Castle wedding.

MAIL-ORDER WAS IN FASHION on Center Island long before Amazon put most of America’s shopping malls out of business. We have no stores on the island, but six days a week the U.S. Mail comes by boat and the noisy single-engine orange plane of San Juan Airlines brings United Parcel Service packages to our grassy airfield.

That’s how I came to be the owner of a mail-order tuxedo that I wore to my nephew Patrick’s wedding last week. I got it on Etsy for $37.95, with free shipping, from a Florida tuxedo shop that sells its used rental outfits online. “Nice enough for a wedding, inexpensive enough for a costume!” said the sales pitch.

I was pleasantly surprised. This was actually a new jacket. It had no brand-name label, and I hate to think of what child laborer in what Third World country sewed it. But it is well made of nice-quality wool with satin lapels, and the guilt factor is really no more than you might feel about your iPhone.

The wedding was a treat, at Thornewood Castle, on American Lake south of Tacoma. A 118-year-old Gothic Tudor-style manor house, its brick came from a mansion in Wales. Appropriate to the venue, Patrick and his partner (now wife) Heather hired a quartet of sword-wielding knights to add flair — and a bit of jousting — to the occasion.

What wedding doesn’t go better with a little swordplay?

So, the mail-order tux was a success. Not sure when I’ll have occasion to wear it again. I suppose I can get buried in it. (Joking. To quote from Monty Python: “I’m not dead yet!”)

The other surprise for me, and it’s bittersweet: good neighbor John (“The Mad Birder”) and his spouse, Carol, are leaving us. They put their island home on the market many months ago, with plans to build a new place not far from their current mainland home in La Conner, Skagit County. I thought it might never happen, but a week ago they accepted an offer on their Center Island retreat.

My late wife, Barbara, and I became close friends with MB and his spouse when they first arrived almost 10 years ago and we discovered we were both former sailboat liveaboards who liked cats. John and I are both writers, with writing studios on our island properties (mine a “hut,” his a “shack”). Barbara, like Carol, was a talented cook with a flair for entertaining. After Barbara’s death, John and Carol invited me to dinner at their place the night of their arrival every time they visited the island, about once a month. I contributed salad or dessert. It has been a treasured friendship.

They hadn’t been out to the island since early July, an unusual absence for them. Wednesday, an email came from John, addressed to me as well as Center Island Farm proprietors (and mutual friends) Chris and Monique. John told us of the cabin sale, and that his two most recent books had found publishers and would be out a year from now. Good news for them. They would be out to the island for a quick overnight the next day. Could we all join them for dinner?

In a phone chat, I told my friend Daniel of the occasion. “It’s the Last Supper!” he quipped. That cut a little close to the quick. Later, the Mad Birder said they might be out again for final packing, so he cast our repast of Monique’s deviled eggs, my three-bean salad and Carol’s eggplant parmesan as the “Penultimate Supper.”

We’re keeping fingers crossed for equally happy relations with the new neighbors. It’s a small island. We all make an effort to get along, and so far that has paid off. (No yappy little dogs, please, please, please.)

Meanwhile, it’s October! I’ve been occupied repairing my boat trailer after a structural failure that thankfully didn’t damage WeLike. (On Center Island, the repairman is me.) Next weekend I’ll join my friend Orcas Tom at Shawtoberfest, an Oktoberfest celebration on neighboring Shaw Island, pop. 188. Performers will include Broken Bow Stringband (bluegrass out of Bellingham) and the Jukebox Boys (“Friday Harbor’s favorite party band!”). High times in the archipelago!

Finding other ways to keep busy, ahead of the midterms I’m writing get-out-the-vote letters for Vote Forward. There’s little I can do from my rock to defend democracy in what could be one of the key elections of our generation. But this is something I can do. Join me?

And remember it’s the spooky season of vampires, werewolves and orange vegetables with scary faces. The president is on the stump across the nation. Keep kids safe and watch your wallet.

As seasons shift down, all I hear is ‘ahhhh’

Framed by bronze madronas, friend Orcas Tom takes in the view from our September dinner table on James Island.

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REPLACING SUMMER’S MUSCULAR BUZZ from a neighbor’s power saw, now comes the gentle sigh of wind in tall firs. Instead of goldfinches fluttering at my bird feeder, golden leaves whirl on cooling zephyrs.

From August’s idyll, my island is shifting to idle.

I had a busy summer, guiding visitors who came to my islands from Vermont, Florida, Texas, Alaska, and all over. My gig with Road Scholar, the international tour outfitter offering educational travel for folks 50 and older, took a week of each of my summer months. When I wasn’t wearing my tour-guide vest, I was working my own Skil saw and rebuilding my back porch.

In my Road Scholar red vest, second row right: Shepherding 34 visitors through the San Juans in July.

Completing that task, which was on my to-do list for several summers, has been wholly satisfying. Situated halfway down a steep hillside, my cabin is subject to earth creep. Over 25 years soil and massive rocks heeding gravity’s marching orders had submerged the base of my cedar porch. Rot ran rampant. With pick-ax and shovel I unearthed the decayed timbers, shielding their replacement planks with upright cement paver stones to keep the hillside at bay.

When not toiling with tools, I was at my laptop’s keyboard reviewing edits of my friend Neil’s novel, Near the Wild Heart. Lake Union Publishing, an imprint of Amazon, will publish it next February. This spring and summer brought edit after edit, with multiple reviews and proofreads. My one-off role as literary agent morphed into editorial assistant. A triumph this week: delivery in my island mailbox of two advance reader’s copies (Neil got a box of 45!), which include the full-color cover, interior photos, map, author’s note, the works. It’s a thrill to sit and read it like, well, a real book.

Autumn’s gold is starting to show on my aspen.

Another summer accomplishment: the apparent prospering of the spring-planted aspen sapling next to my writing hut. I watered it faithfully to nurture young roots. It leafed out beautifully, and now that foliage quakes in the breeze and shows the first hints of autumn gold that makes aspens the glory of the Colorado Rockies. Surprisingly to many, aspens do grow naturally in the San Juans. Sucia Island has a big grove.

After partaking of my island’s Labor Day salmon barbecue and meeting new friends at the clubhouse — a sailing family with shiver-me-timbers tales of hurricanes and other salty adventures — I took a couple days off this week, buzzing in WeLike over to Orcas Island to pick up my buddy Tom. We had a fun campout on James Island, a marine state park just 10 minutes from my Center Island dock.

Coming later this month: a family wedding at a honest-to-god castle near Tacoma, for which I ordered a mail-order tuxedo jacket (we’ll see how that turns out). Port Orchard friends Dave and Jill will rendezvous with me in La Conner in October. And today I sat down and booked a November flight to California to spend a few days with Olympia chums Daniel and Jean, who like to spend weeks in Berkeley adoring a young grandson. Along the way, I’ll have a stopover on Seattle’s Magnolia Bluff to see former Seattle Times colleague Carol, her husband, Tom, and our mutual friend Holly. Nurturing friendships is important when you live alone with your cat on a little rock in the Salish Sea.

To everything there is a season, dear Reefers. Which reminds me: Midterm elections are coming this fall. Please make plans to vote. Strategize ahead of time; don’t let anyone stop you. The U.S.A. remains a democracy only as long as we make it so.

Sunset pinkens the sky above Mount Baker, as seen from James Island.

When fuchsias go berserk

The hanging basket isn’t visible beneath the bronze-tinged foliage of my wide-spreading Autumnale fuchsia, grown from a small start two springs ago.

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CLIMATE-CHANGE DOUBTER, are you? Come goggle at the flower baskets on my Center Island deck, and then we’ll talk.

Two manifestations of climate change that I’ve witnessed since acquiring Nuthatch Cabin in the fall of 2003: (A) rip-snorting winter gales, previously rare, that have become commonplace in the past five years, setting my tall Doug firs dancing a mad tarantella; and (B) snowless winters with temperatures rarely dipping to freezing.

Admittedly, the second phenomenon has really only manifested here in the past two years, hardly qualifying as a scientific sampling. But some results have been startling.

Case in point, the Mutant Colossal Fuchsias of Chinook Way.

Chinook Way, in case you don’t recall, is the high-faluting name for the one-lane, dead-end gravel road in front of my island hermitage.

For some years I have nurtured fuchsia baskets on my deck in the warmer months. Once or twice I retired them to the woodshed come December, and one year the plants came back to life in the spring. But usually winter frosts have their way and I yank the brittle, dead vines out by the roots to begin afresh with new fuchsia starts in my wooden baskets come April.

This past winter, however, serious frosts never came. My fuchsias shivered a bit, but bloomed nonstop. Come spring, they also started growing like crabgrass after a good rain. One is now a healthy yard tall. Another has spread drooping arms like a giant Pacific octopus.

It’s a tight squeeze to get past the Dark Eyes fuchsia that has taken over my deck in front of Nuthatch Cabin.

“You’re growing fuchsia trees!” daughter Lillian declared on her latest visit.

Next winter, if Jack Frost takes another season off the job, the question might not be whether my fuchsias will freeze. But will they manage the tarantella?

Back to splendid Sucia for an August campout and a heron friend

A golden sunset lights up a sailboat moored on Sucia Island’s Fossil Bay.

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I’VE KEPT IT NO SECRET: Sucia Island is my favorite place in the San Juans, and probably on Earth. Washington State Parks calls it the crown jewel of its marine park system, and one of the top boating destinations in the world. Forgive the 1960s advertising earworm, but a second summer visit to Sucia is like Doublemint gum: double the pleasure, double the fun.

My daughter, Lillian, and her partner, Lux, just headed home to Seattle after a three-night visit with me, including an overnight campout on Sucia. I slept aboard WeLike at the state-park dock at Fossil Bay while they pitched my good old REI dome tent at the island’s best campsite, atop a rocky knoll dotted with madrona trees and gnarled Douglas firs.

A Great Blue Heron kept us company during this year’s pilgrimage to Barbara’s bench.

The weather was sunny and temperate. After setting up camp our first outing was a hike through shady cedars to my late wife Barbara’s memorial bench adjacent to Shallow Bay. We enjoyed a sack lunch and took in the glorious panoramic view that included several of the neighboring San Juans, a handful of Canada’s Gulf Islands and a wide expanse of glittering saltwater. Lillian and I make an annual pilgrimage to the bench to commune with her mum’s spirit. Many of you Reef readers donated to help place the bench there. Thank you.

During last year’s visit, a lone harbor seal came on to the shore rocks immediately below the bench and watched us with soulful brown eyes the entire time we sat there. Barbara’s spirit animal? This year it was a great blue heron that stayed on the rocks the whole hour we were there.

Like the rest of the state, the San Juans have a burn ban but we were still able to cook on our two-burner propane campstove. That evening, after we played a couple hands of a favorite card game, Lillian concocted a tasty pasta with penne, chickpeas, sundried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, capers, lemon zest and tender fresh kale from my Center Island deck-rail planter.

Lux, left, and Lillian on Barbara’s bench near Shallow Bay.

I realized during this visit that I’d never paid proper attention to the sign at the head of the Fossil Bay dock. It explained that two dozen of the region’s yacht clubs and boating associations, united as the Puget Sound Interclub Association, were largely responsible for the island’s existence as a park. While Washington State Parks in 1952 had acquired 115 acres of today’s 564-acre Sucia Island Marine State Park, the boat clubs rallied in the late 1950s to stop a plan for private vacation-cabin development of the remainder of the island. Raising $25,000 (a whopping sum in that day), they purchased and donated most of the rest of the island for the state park. Again, I say thank you.

Today, the island remains pristine, with numerous scenic hiking trails, 60 campsites, two docks, 48 mooring buoys in six bays and coves…and a special park bench with a lovely view.

Happy August, dear readers.

Just messing about in boats is hard to beat

Lopezian friends David Foutch and Lynn Thompson with WeLike at Fossil Bay on Sucia Island.

MY LOPEZ ISLAND FRIENDS Lynn and David recently posed one of those “can’t hardly say no” questions:

“Would you take us in your boat to see Sucia Island if we pay for the gas and bring a picnic?”

Does a kid say no to chocolate cake with ice cream and Cool Whip?

For years my friends had heard me speak glowingly of Sucia, my favorite island of the San Juan Archipelago. My family and I had taken our sailboat there every summer for about 20 years running. Lynn and David, who live most of the year in Seattle but spend plenty of time at a lovely getaway home near Iceberg Point on Lopez, had never been to Sucia, a popular marine state park that is humanly populated full-time only by a ranger or two (along with herons, eagles, kingfishers, otters, seals and other wild creatures). It is in the far-flung northeastern-most part of our island chain.

WeLike was built by Skagit Boat Co. of La Conner in 1957.

Lynn, now retired, was a colleague and chum of mine at The Seattle Times. Her husband, David, is a semi-retired Boeing engineer who still works for the Lazy B three days a week, even when they spend weeks on Lopez. He is part of a group studying how to make air travel carbon-neutral, a worthy goal if ever there was one.

Honestly, I’d have jumped at the chance to show them Sucia even without the promise of gas money. But David is still collecting a regular paycheck, so I didn’t feel too guilty. Besides, when we pulled up to the Blakely Island fuel dock on a pristine morning last Wednesday, I pumped in only 5-1/2 gallons rather than fill my voluminous tanks. That was an act of mercy; the ethanol-free gas my Evinrude 90 prefers was selling for $7.52 a gallon. Ouch.

David and Lynn wanted to walk up the dock to the Blakely Island Store, which I had never visited on previous stops for fuel. It was a pleasant diversion, with fresh-baked doughnuts, at a beautiful spot with waterfront views of Orcas and Obstruction islands. An old-school attraction outside the store: a telephone booth with an actual functioning pay phone, among the last in the islands.

By 11 a.m. we arrived at Sucia’s Fossil Bay, with hopes of finding space at one of the two docks. A challenge this day: At 12:30 Sucia would experience one of its lowest ebb tides of the year, at minus 3.1 feet. That meant that even 20-foot WeLike, which needs less than two feet of water to stay afloat, might be sitting on the bottom at near-shore parts of the docks.

But as we entered the bay a big motoryacht was exiting. A correspondingly large space was open at one of the docks, well away from shore. We nabbed 20 feet of moorage.

We chatted with other friendly boaters (“Let the Fun BE GIN” quipped one skipper’s T-shirt) while the vintage WeLike collected her share of admiring comments from passersby old enough to remember 1957 Chevys of a similar color and design.

We then enjoyed a couple hours of hiking on the island, with a picnic stop at the memorial bench dedicated to my late wife, Barbara. The bench, financed by a GoFundMe effort Lynn had donated to, commands one of Sucia’s best viewpoints. From a shoreside bluff it takes in a splendid panorama of Patos, Waldron and Orcas islands in the San Juans and looks across Boundary Passage to Saturna and Pender in Canada’s Gulf Islands. Kayakers paddled by just beneath us and a bald eagle zoomed just above our heads as we munched tasty cold chicken grilled by David, apple-berry cole slaw that I contributed, and Lynn’s delectable chocolate espresso cookie bars. Tim’s-brand potato chips from the Blakely store ensured our salt levels didn’t plunge.

Your loyal correspondent at Barbara’s bench on Sucia Island. Lynn Thompson photo.

As we departed around 2, the tide was flooding in like kids to a schoolroom at recess’s end. Light winds made for a relatively easy passage back to the public dock at Lopez where I dropped Lynn and David.

A successful day trip on a good old boat. Hard to wish for better.

All play and no work in the islands? Not quite.

Spraying fresh paint on a favorite Adirondack chair constituted one of the checkmarks on my summer to-do list so far.

ISLAND SUMMERS HAVE THEIR JOYS, for sure. Bare-chested lunches on my warm deck. Watching Galley Cat roll luxuriously in the sunshine. Watering my new aspen as its leaves quake in a breeze. But sweet doesn’t come without sweat. It’s the season of cabin maintenance and outdoor projects.

One of the magnets on the Nuthatch’s venerable Kenmore fridge holds up my Summer 2026 to-do list that fills most of an 8-1/2 by 11 page. I won’t likely check off every item, but I’ll do my best to knock the hell out of it before fall rains set in.

The past couple days I’ve worked to exhaustion, accomplishing two big projects.

Yesterday, I finally pulled off the sprawling tarp that had protected my 20-foot cuddy-cabin cruiser, WeLike, from dirt, dust and weather as it sat on its trailer near the island clubhouse since last October. Usually the boat’s in the water by March, but I had a busy spring helping my friend get his novel published — reviewing multiple edits, responding to queries, generally acting as the umpire between author and publisher. My retirement days have been packed as of late.

A chrome nameplate identifies the La Conner-based builder of *WeLike.*

The tarp covered most of the boat, but a six-foot section of each side deck was exposed. And those patches were filthy and crusted with months’ worth of fallen fir needles. I spent hours with brushes, scrub pads and soapy water to bring the old girl back to respectability before hitching trailer to tractor and launching WeLike into Read’s Bay, our little nook of the Salish Sea. Tied to the dock, she looks shipshape and Bristol fashion.

The previous day I accomplished a, um, stinky project that had topped my procrastination list for several years. You might not be surprised to hear it had to do with my sewer system.

Nuthatch cabin was built at the end of the 1990s. The septic system shortly pre-dated a code change that now requires inspection ports in the drainfield.

An unavoidable part of rural life, especially on a remote island like mine, is being chief custodian of your own sewage system. “It’s a shitty job but somebody has to do it,” you might say. But I’m classier than that, you know?

As said custodian, several years back I ventured to the county seat in Friday Harbor to take a class designed to teach homeowners how to maintain their own septic systems. “This is the most expensive appliance you will ever own!” the dour instructor informed us. Screw it up and the replacement cost might be $40,000, he said with an expression to rival The Wizard of Oz‘s Miss Gulch as she recited Toto’s misdeeds.

Positioning a final inspection port on my septic drainfield required bushwhacking through waist-high salal and swordferns.

In the class, I also learned about the required inspection ports. Without them I would not be able to sell my property when the time comes. I think I saw a self-satisfied twinkle in the instructor’s eye when he imparted this fact.

The ports are just what they sound like. First I had to locate the drainfield and dig down a foot to find the thick plastic domed shell that creates a tunnel for the effluent that has been digested by microbes in the septic tank before flowing onward — if everything is working as it should.

An inspection port four-inches in diameter is required within a few feet of each end of the drainfield. For me, that meant using a four-inch hole saw to create an opening in the dome for permanent insertion of a length of PVC pipe topped by a removable cap. The objective: to enable the eager homeowner to peer down and see what’s there. Oh, yum.

To shorten a long story: Installing the port nearest the septic tank was relatively easy, once I used a garden trowel to dig down and follow the pipe exiting my tank. The big challenge was at the far end: locating it amid a tangle of salal and swordferns that had grown up over the drainfield in the past 27 years.

A new bamboo fountain burbles on my front deck. Birds drink from it in the dry days of summer.

Construction drawings for my place, bestowed upon me by my earnest friend with San Juan County, showed a single 50-foot drain line reaching across the open space in front of my home. The only way I could locate the far end was to use two-by-fours placed end to end to create a straight line, stopping to dig every six or seven feet to ensure I was on the right course.

Thursday, I located part of the domed structure one foot below the salal and approximately 47 feet from the start of the field. Eureka! I drilled my inspection hole, installed the port and called it done.

Good news: Peering into the new port, all I saw below was dry, bare soil. That means every bit of stinky brown water is soaking into the ground as intended. I won’t have to remortgage my place to buy a new “appliance.”

Other little projects of recent weeks: restitching WeLike’s canvas top and rewiring two defunct bilge pumps; painting a favorite Adirondack chair whose original stain had given up to winter rains and summer sun; and replacing the worn-out bamboo fountain on my deck, which is a favorite hot-weather watering hole for island songbirds.

Rebuilding my back porch before summer’s end is the 800-pound gorilla on my to-do list. I’ve started bringing home more cedar deck planks from the Lopez Island lumber yard, and I’ve set aside the week after next to get a start on it.

The best part of all this? It feels really good to check something off the list. Now I’m gonna go put my feet up. The Adirondack chair beckons…

Summer comes to the San Juans

Fittingly, children powered the Earth float in Saturday’s Solstice Parade on Orcas Island. Photo by Thomas Willard.

HAPPY SOLSTICE! It’s almost 10 p.m. and there’s still a good bit of light in my Center Island sky this evening. It’s the longest day of the year.

I marked summer’s debut yesterday with a visit to neighboring Orcas Island, where my friend Tom hosted me at the annual Solstice Parade through the village of Eastsound. It was a celebration of island whimsy and gentle spirit, with human-powered floats, wacky costumes, a winged woman on stilts, a baton-twirling drill squad and much more.

Here are a few of my favorite images from the parade.

Islanders of every age paraded elaborate costumes and exhibited high spirits.

We welcomed the summer sun’s return to the San Juans.

Nothing says summer like a flamingo-headed wild woman in a lacy pink skirt. Photo by Thomas Willard

Happy summer, all.

Surf’s up in the San Juans

Oceanspray blossoms fill the forest understory on Center Island.

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IT’S MID-JUNE ON CENTER ISLAND. My meadow’s wildflowers came and went in May, and the wild roses with their pink blush and nose-tickling scent are almost a memory.

But we can always depend on a sudden wild splash of creamy, sun-catching florabundance just before the summer solstice when the oceanspray blooms. Bearing large tassels comprising scores of starry florets, oceanspray virtually floods our forest with waves of white.

This woody shrub (Holodiscus discolor) is native from Southern British Columbia to Southern California, with variations reaching into South America. It typically ranges from three to 10 feet in height, and spreads like crazy in open forest floor like the front of my island plot.

It’s also known as ironwood, for the hardness of its woody stalk. According to the website Native Plants PNW, native tribes used the wood for many tools and utensils. Rendered even harder by heating it over a fire and polishing it with horsetail stems, the wood was used for salmon-roasting tongs because it won’t burn, for digging sticks, fishing hooks, needles, canoe paddles, bows, and spear, harpoon, and arrow shafts. Oceanspray pegs were even used in construction when nails were not available.

Every June, the blooms are a welcome sight that welcomes summer to the San Juans.

Speaking of which: The 2026 summer solstice occurs on Sunday, June 21, at 1:24 a.m. PDT. This exact astronomical moment marks the official start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and brings the longest day — with 15 hours and 59 minutes of daylight in our islands — and shortest night of the year.

I’m marking the event by participating with a friend in Orcas Island’s homespun Solstice Parade through downtown Eastsound. What are your plans?

My island life happens every day

An American Goldfinch, our Washington State bird, peers back at me from my birdfeeder.

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I FLEW AWAY FOR TWO WEEKS and everything changed at home.

The foxglove bloomed! The goldfinches fledged! The kale is ready to harvest!

My trip to France was a refresher, a challenge, a kick in the pants. But as an old hermit who lives on a 176-acre island, I’ve come to realize these little daily changes that tick along with the clock on my kitchen wall now seem to matter to me most.

Summer is coming. Keep an eye peeled.

Stalks of lilac-hued foxglove flowered on Center Island while I was off gallivanting in France.

Dinner tonight will include a salad from Nuthatch Cabin’s rail-mounted planter. In my two-week absence, the kale grew like I did the summer I was 14 and consuming a quart of milk and half a box of Cheerios every day.
The marigold seedlings are coming along nicely, too.

Life goes on, it happens ev’ry day. So appreciate what you got, before it’s taken away. — Ray Davies, The Kinks

Up a scenic river with no paddles on a sweltering, memorable adventure in the south of France

Crew member Jean Farber looks ahead from the bow of our boat to the village of Laroque-des-Arcs as we begin our voyage up France’s Lot River.

SOMETIMES A DREAM TRIP turns into, well, more of an adventure than a dream.

Adventure ensues when things don’t go quite as planned.

Map of France: Pushpin points to Cahors, our boat’s base on the Lot River

I just returned to Center Island from a major adventure in France. I’m glad I went, but boy, am I glad to be home.

Don’t get me wrong. Adventures can be good. This one was good, in the big picture. Good, sometimes great. With lots of difficulties along the way.

At the core of it was seven days on a chartered 38-foot motor vessel that I skippered with family and friends on the incredibly scenic River Lot — rhymes with “boat” — in Southwest France. Five of us aboard navigated the rocky canyons of the meandering rural waterway that included frequent locks that bypassed cascading weirs first created in the Middle Ages to divert water to grain-grinding mills. In the early 19th century more weirs were added to deepen the river for coal-carrying barges until railways rendered barges obsolete.

All but one of the nine locks we transited up the river and back were do-it-yourself, meaning two of our crew went ashore to work wheels and cranks that opened and closed sluiceways and big iron gates.

Our river boat, the Cubry Les Soing, was named for the town where it was first launched.

That was a fun novelty until an unseasonable heat wave pushed temperatures into the 90s every day. With the intense sun — our base of Cahors was just over 100 miles from Mediterranean shores — the heat was debilitating. Across France, May heat records shattered like an ice cube bouncing off a kitchen floor.

Our dream trip became a week of coping.

There were various complications. Two of our crew arrived with miserable May colds, which kept getting worse. Another discovered his severe intolerance for such heat. Neither a Catholic nor a Christian, he nonetheless spent much of his onshore time cooling off in shady churches lit by stained glass depictions of the Holy Mother. To escape the heat more than once, crew members booked hotel rooms when we arrived in charming villages. Air conditioning was a special lure the boat didn’t offer. Coming and going, our crew dealt with canceled flights and canceled train runs, even a derailment (of someone else’s train) that caused a long delay. (I hope passengers on that train were OK.) “Jinxed” was a term that came to mind more than once on our dream trip.

So it was a tough dozen days. But, hey, as one of my island neighbors noted upon my return: At least it was France!

Daniel and Jean Farber walk a former towpath blasted from a limestone wall along the Lot. A lock can be seen in the background.

Oui. That meant wonderful food everywhere we went, affordably priced compared to the Trumpian U.S.A. On arrival in France, I found that even a run-of-the-mill Monoprix supermarket in Paris offered deli salads worthy of Seattle’s better restaurants. Paul Hollywood would have drooled over the pastries. In the little river town of Vers, where daughter Lillian gifted me a night in a gorgeously modern air-conditioned hotel room in a renovated 14th-century tower, we dined well at an outdoor table near the pool. I enjoyed a dinner of asparagus soup, housemade pâté de foie gras, pan-fried trout, ratatouille and a tasty cheese platter, with a nice local rosé wine. The tab: less than $50.

My friends Daniel and Jean and I enjoyed a 4 1/2-mile roundtrip riverside walk from one of our moorages to the marvelous medieval village of Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, perched 1,200 feet up a rocky promontory above the Lot. We set out at 7:30 to enjoy the cool of the morning. The down side: We arrived too early to enjoy a good French espresso at a sidewalk cafe. Opening time in French villages is around 10.

Crew member Lux, right, offers crew member Daniel a tip on operating a do-it-yourself lock on the Lot River.

Another day we escaped the heat by hiring a taxi to take us to the famous Pech Merle Cave to see cave paintings that carbon dating has confirmed to be 29,000 years old. In a cool and damp setting far underground, the most memorable images were iconic drawings of two leopard-spotted horses rendered by ancient humans using charcoal powder and red ochre. It was stunning to ponder the remarkable images surrounded by the artist’s own handprints among the limestone cave’s stalactites and stalagmites. Three local teenagers discovered the images while exploring the cave in 1922.

Saint-Cirq-Lapopie’s hillside-perching church overlooks a splendid panorama of the Lot River Valley.

The boat voyage was, indeed, an adventure. If typical May temperatures in the 70s had prevailed, it might have been the dream trip we’d envisioned.

Human skulls and femurs are stacked in the Paris Catacombs.

On our return to Paris, before catching a flight home, Lillian and her partner, Lux, accompanied me on another underground tour where we took refuge from the heat. In the Paris Catacombs, far beneath the city’s streets, millions of human skeletons reside. Parisians of every walk of life ended up for centuries in underground limestone mines, starting in the 1600s when the city’s cemeteries filled up. Today it is a sobering tourist attraction. The bones and skulls have been artistically arranged and stacked, in part to help structurally support the city above them. I came away with one clear thought: Pursuant to the foundational national motto of France, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” dating back to the French Revolution, the Catacombs clearly demonstrate how Parisians of past centuries were treated equally in death.

On a lighter note: My final morning in Paris I struck out early to explore the neighborhood around my 13th Arrondissement rental apartment. Wandering at random near Place d’Italie, I discovered and photographed a delightful variety of wall paintings — too sophisticated and elaborate to be called graffiti. I’ll end here with a sampling. It just might inspire me to make some new art on the walls of Nuthatch Cabin. Watch out, Center Island.