Alone again (naturally)

I’VE BEEN OUT OF THE DATING POOL for more than 50 years. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that I muffed things with my first love affair since I became a widower three years ago.

I won’t bandy the details, other than to say the parting was amicable and now I’m back to spending solo days on my remote rock in the San Juans.

So when February granted us winter-weary islanders a brief break in the rain and cold, I Carpe’d the damn Diem, as my brother and I like to say. I fired up the community tractor and launched WeLike, my restored 1957 Skagit Express Cruiser, for the first time since autumn. Gave Galley Cat a pat, told her I’d return soon, and cruised over to Lopez Island for the day. It had been a while.

It had been a while, with plenty of fir needles and a little bit of moss to hose off of WeLike before she dared show her bow to the public at Hunter Bay Public Dock, the Lopez locale where I keep my old Ford pickup, Ranger Rick.

Lopez gave me a sunny day, surprisingly warm. I ditched my winter coat as soon as I tied up the boat. It was so warm that a gaggle of swimsuit-clad youths was just arriving at the dock with towels. With a smile I gave them “the talk” (about hypothermia). They promised to jump out as quickly as they jumped in.

“We just want the experience,” one girl told me happily. Oh, yeah, I sort of remember being that young.

For me it was a day of running errands, mostly. A stop at NAPA Auto Parts to get a bottle of stuff to treat watery gasoline so I could get my backup outboard running smoothly. (Gas-tank condensation is a hazard of sitting unused through a long winter.)

Second was a much-needed stop at the Lopez Dump — really just a transfer station — to jettison two big totes of recyclables at the island’s remarkably thorough and well-managed recycling center. The recycling combined with home-composting my produce waste meant my actual trash (the dump management labels it “Absolute Garbage”) was limited to one small Rubbermaid tote. The bill: $5.

Next came some fun: a stop at the Lopez Island Library. When my late wife, Barbara, and I moved to Center Island in 2018, we shelled out the $50 non-resident fee to become borrowers from the excellent little library that occupies an old schoolhouse on the edge of Lopez Village.

I knew which aisle I wanted, and quickly found a book to occupy me through perhaps the rest of winter: “A Column of Fire,” Welsh author Ken Follett’s 900+-page sequel to his masterwork “The Pillars of the Earth,” which chronicled construction of a British cathedral in medieval times.

More fun at my next stop: Isabel’s Espresso, to redeem the full punchcard I’ve been carrying in my wallet for months. I talked sailboats (and the idea of February swimming) with the jovial, dreadlocked barista while he brewed my free 16-ounce half-caff latte. I sat outside on the sunny deck, sipped my coffee from a massive ceramic cup and cracked the first pages of the Ken Follett. Ahhh. Does life get better?

But eventually necessity called. Among other motivations to make the trip: My fridge was out of fresh produce.

Rarely have I gone through a checkout counter with more fruit and vegetables than that visit to Lopez Village Market. Honeycrisp apples were on sale, as were white mushrooms and tomatoes-on-the-vine. Got a giant handful of organic kale and some overpriced broccoli crowns. There was no price posted for the celery. I learned why when I saw it ring up at almost $5, which is highway robbery for a vegetable whose fiber is really its only nutritional value. However, I like it as a vehicle for peanut butter.

Taking care of things that needed taking care of, I stopped near the supermarket’s gas island for the annual addition of air to Ranger Rick’s tires. It was going on 3 in the afternoon before I finally pulled in to the gravel lot at Otis Perkins Park, edging broad San Juan Channel, to eat my sack lunch. When I looked up from my book, my view was of a big white-and-green state ferry chugging past Shaw Island.

The sun had dropped behind the crest of the island as I returned to my boat around 4. With the sun went the warmth. Shivering, I pulled my coat back on as I loaded aboard my groceries and empty trash bins.

Happily, even after the winter’s hiatus, my big Evinrude ran perfectly as WeLike sprinted like a greyhound back to Center Island.

Alone again, this winter. But spring is on its way. And Galley and I have lots of plans.