A memorable blue-moon August

SUMMER ON MY ISLAND is as much about going away as staying. It’s the season when invitations beckon me to friends’ sun-drenched decks, and calm waters call me to crank up WeLike’s big Evinrude and go exploring.

I started the month with a delightful few days with friends at Indianola and Belfair. My buddy Steve Miletich, with whom I started and ended my journalism career (at the Sammamish High School newspaper, Totem Talk, and in the Seattle Times newsroom), invited me to his family’s compound at Indianola on the Kitsap Peninsula. In a classic beach house from the 1920s I spent a few sun-baked days with a happy passel of extended family of Steve and his wife, Emily Langlie. (Emily was a newbie TV reporter in Yakima in the 1980s when I was starting there as a daily newspaper reporter; she went on to a stint with KOMO in Seattle, and now works in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.)

We all ate too much good food and watched the henna-tinted super moon rise over Puget Sound. One day, Steve, his brother, Dave, and I drove south to Belfair for a reunion with another Totem Talk alumnus, Mark Morris, who retired five years ago as photo director for the Sacramento newspaper. Mark’s family maintains a beach home, designed by famed Seattle architect Victor Steinbrueck, on the shore of Hood Canal. It was all several days of happy reconnection.

More bittersweet but still soul-nourishing was my solo outing aboard WeLike to Sucia Island in the San Juans a week ago. When my family and friends scattered my late wife’s ashes in those waters and dedicated a memorial bench on Sucia in Barbara’s honor a year ago this week, I vowed to revisit it annually. This was my first pilgrimage.

I took a sack lunch and ate it perched on the waterfront, bluff-top bench, which commands one of the island’s finest views, looking northwestward toward Waldron Island and into Canada. As kayakers paddled the sparkling waters, I chatted with Barbara. I told her about our daughter and her new bakery job, and how we’ve both been doing. The bench is on a lightly used trail, so nobody was there to wonder about my sanity. I took some spray cleaner, a brush, and paper towels and gave the bench a good cleaning, though it had weathered the year in very good shape. I was able to tie up to a state-parks buoy in Shallow Bay and slept in WeLike’s cozy cuddy cabin. Within sight of the bench, my chats with Barbara lasted into the evening.

I returned to my island for just three days before heading out again Saturday morning on WeLike for Friday Harbor. An old Seattle Times friend, Greg Gilbert, was stopping over in Friday Harbor in his classic 1926 motor yacht, Winifred. In a class known as a Lake Union Dreamboat, the name well fits Winifred, which Greg maintains in cherry condition, with gleaming varnish and gilded name.

This was a very special occasion: At age 77, Greg had retired as a Seattle Times photographer last Tuesday, after working for the newspaper since he was 21.

He generously let me invite my Friday Harbor friends (and fellow Inside Passage voyagers) Barbara Marrett and Bill Watson to dinner aboard Winifred, and we all got along like gangbusters. I procured two-pounds of fresh salmon from the fish shop on the Friday Harbor dock and we had a scrumptious dinner on Winifred’s open fantail as the almost-full moon dawdled across the sky. Barbara M. and Bill brought superbly fresh vegetables from their garden. Greg’s contribution, besides the perfect venue: three chilled bottles of Champagne. It was a memorable evening, even if the memory gets a little fuzzy toward the end.

Before departing on Sunday, I accompanied Barbara and Greg to a San Juan Island ceremony commemorating the recent death of Tokitae, the last Southern Resident orca in captivity (at Miami’s Seaquarium), and marking the installation of a Lummi tribe’s carving depicting the orca known as Tahlequah, who carried her dead calf more than 1,000 miles around the Salish Sea and generated worldwide headlines in 2018.

Now I’m back in the writing hut on my rocky knoll, where we’re having the first wet week of summer. The sound of raindrops plunking on my cedar-shake roof is punctuated now and again with kettle-drum rumbles of thunder.

On Wednesday evening, if there’s a clearing in the clouds, look for the Blue Moon, the second full moon — and second close-to-earth supermoon — of this month. Every which way I look at it, my August has been full, and at times super. I hope the same for you.