These busy August memories will warm my island winter

SUMMER ADVENTURES help erase memories of winter storms and lonely January days on my island, where Galley Cat and I represent about one-tenth of the off-season population.

Stevie Lennartson and Kevin Rineer exchange vows in Walla Walla as your correspondent officiates in his father’s old captain’s cap.

These past 10 days I’ve crisscrossed the state by car, officiated at a wedding, experienced broiling temperatures as well as chilly tempests, and reconnected with high-school buddies and the journalism teacher who helped launch us in our careers.

The wedding was in Walla Walla, uniting my friends Stevie Lennartson and Kevin Rineer. Stevie is the daughter of Patti Lennartson and her late husband, my old friend Barney Lennartson. Our families met when we lived on our sailboats on the same dock on Seattle’s Lake Union in the mid-1990s. Our daughters grew up together, and we shared sailing adventures from the San Juans to the British Virgin Islands.

This was the first time I’ve officiated at a wedding. I wore my father’s old captain’s hat — he was an avid sailor — because everybody knows sea captains can perform marriages. (The couple made it official at the Walla Walla courthouse, so I didn’t have to go online to get legal with the Universal Life Church.) It was an emotion-packed experience as I spoke about what made my own 41-year marriage strong.

The 11 a.m. ceremony for family and friends, outdoors by a fountain in Walla Walla’s gorgeous Pioneer Park, was perfectly timed for pleasant temperatures in the 70s. Late that afternoon, the heat topped out at a blistering 97.

The weekend held many highlights, including the groom’s parents’ hosted dinner at a Greek restaurant in Walla Walla’s pleasant downtown. Post-wedding, we enjoyed a catered taco-lunch reception in the park, and a ham dinner at Patti’s house to wind things down. Friends and family came from Florida, Montana, California and all across Washington.

For me and daughter Lillian, who traveled with me, a “low-light” was when the air conditioning failed in my old Honda, converting it to the role of mobile sauna in the Eastern Washington heat. Ah, well, these things build character, right?

After a quick return to my island for a couple days, I was off again to stay at the Hood Canal waterfront cabin of high-school friend Mark Morris, who was a photographer for Totem Talk, our Sammamish High School newspaper, back in the 1970s. Steve Miletich, another buddy and former Totem Talk staffer, joined us, along with his wife, Emily Langlie. Mark’s brother Matthew and his Bernese Mountain Doodle dog, Tigger, rounded out the party.

Mark, Steve and I — and my late wife, Barbara — were students of Sammamish journalism teacher Dianne Hanson. From her class, I ended up as Travel and Outdoors Editor at The Seattle Times. Steve was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Times. Mark became Director of Photography at California’s Sacramento Bee.

The evening at Mark’s cabin was a fun mini-reunion, in a delightful setting. Mark’s family had numerous friends who played influential roles around Seattle, and famed architect Victor Steinbrueck, who led the battle to preserve and restore the city’s beloved Pike Place Market, had designed their distinctive cabin. At high tide, Hood Canal’s saltwater rippled and seal heads bobbed just yards outside the windows. Following Mark’s excellent salmon dinner, we buoyed our already-high spirits by tuning in Vice President Kamala Harris’s feisty and fearless nomination-acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Proper journalists have to believe in democracy and the American constitution, and both are on the line this fall.

From left: Your loyal correspondent, with Dianne Hanson, Steve Miletich and Mark Morris, on the deck at Stretch Island. Jim Hanson photo.

The next morning, after Mark filled us with French toast topped by four types of berries, he, Steve and I drove 25 minutes south to another remote Salish Sea island: 300-acre Stretch Island, on the far southern reaches of Puget Sound. Dianne and Jim Hanson have retired there in a modern cabin perched on a hillside almost 100 stair-steps above the water.

My buddies and I recently attended our 50-year high-school reunion, so it stands to reason that few of our teachers are still alive. But Dianne Hanson (nee White, when she first started teaching) was a special case: Two years before taking on the challenge of corralling our Class of ’74 news staff and containing the mayhem we tended to strew, she started teaching at age 21. In her first months, she was barely three years older than some of her students. But her energy trumped experience at the time, and her freshly-minted degree made her a font of contemporary knowledge. Exercising a firm hand with us when appropriate, Ms. Hanson loosened the leash when we were investigating and writing with the righteous zeal of youth. Among other things, our newspaper played a key role in blocking ROTC training from the school, on the grounds that it represented political indoctrination of teens not yet old enough to vote. Our writing on the subject attracted Seattle TV stations to cover a school-board hearing where the proposal was quashed in a 2-1 vote.

Having started teaching so young, Dianne is now only in her early 70s, and apparently never learned about the aging process. OK, she’s coloring her hair with more gray highlights, but that’s about it.

Dianne was delighted that we’d tracked her down, and we had a pleasant lunch and hours of catching up with her and “Jaunty Jim,” as we bratty students had dubbed her affable husband when he was in his 20s. Because publishing the newspaper regularly involved hours of after-school work at a professional print shop in Seattle, back in the day Jim often stopped by after work to check in with his wife. We had all become friends. This visit, we all vowed to meet again.

From Stretch Island, I drove friend Steve back to his family’s summer beach-home on northern Puget Sound. His wife, Emily, is a granddaughter of Arthur B. Langlie, a one-time Seattle mayor and three-term Washington governor, whose family has spent many decades of summers at their beach home.

August seemed to morph into November that afternoon. Low clouds doused the sun and shrouded the distant view of the Seattle skyline. A brisk southerly sent Puget Sound waves dancing as if a kid was kicking autumn leaves. Despite the tumult, Emily went for her daily swim, espousing the health benefits of a cold-water dip. (Her family’s Norwegian heritage might have something to do with that.) I shivered and cautioned her about hypothermia. At dinnertime, from the front windows of the Langlies’ delightfully creaky, century-old, salt-pickled beach house we enjoyed nature’s own choreography as we filled up on chicken curry and sipped a good rosé.

Today, back at the Nuthatch, with a happily dramatic reversal of weather, I’m toiling over the keyboard in my cheerful writing hut and listening on my desktop speakers, appropriately, to Johnny Nash singing about a “bright, bright sunshiny day.”

Summer continues on my little island nobody’s heard of. I’m going to keep storing up memories for the winter ahead.

Seeking a Center Island exit strategy

Over the years, winter scenes like this gave me plenty to write about from Nuthatch Cabin. Next winter might be my last here.

THE PENDULUM SWINGS. It’s one of life’s absolutes. Things change, even on Center Island.

I started “Cantwell’s Reef” six years ago with the loosely defined purpose of writing about “ditching the office and making a life on a small island nobody’s heard of.”

The love of my life, Barbara, was my partner in that adventure. The bustling Seattle Times newsroom was the office I had fled. In countless blog posts, I told about learning our way as full-time Center Islanders, situating a cool old boat at the dock and a tough old pickup truck on neighboring Lopez Island. Month after month, my writing marked the turning of seasons, with the arrival of enchanting wildflowers, summer dog days, autumn harvest fairs and winter snows. It’s been a full life.

Now, I turn to my exit strategy.

Cancer took Barbara from me in 2021. The Times newsroom is but a distant memory to me, and in the wake of COVID many staffers work from home. To everything there is a season. Turn, turn, turning pages.

Since Barbara’s death, Galley Cat and I have toughed it out here on our own for three years, but it’s time to look for a new home with more social engagement.

That bell tolled in a way I couldn’t ignore when The Mad Birder and his spouse, my next-door neighbors who have become dear friends and frequent dinner hosts, announced recently that they were putting their cabin up for sale.

The MB just turned 70, and it seems that continuing health challenges and the march of time told him and his dear wife it was time to simplify life and solidify their base in Skagit County, where they have another home.

That seemed like a sign. It is time for me to think about moving on. I will hate to leave this beautiful place, this comfortable cabin, this friendly little island, and my perfect writing hut. But the time is coming.

I won’t move quickly. It will be at least a year before Nuthatch Cabin is ready to put on the market. That deck rebuild needs finishing, for one. An electrical circuit needs repair, the chimney needs replacing, the roof needs a good cleaning, etc. I have no idea where all the travel souvenirs and family mementos will go; I long ago vowed: No more storage units. If I want to flush money away, I own a toilet.

There are challenges, of the type faced by many of my peers in the 65-and-older crowd.

If I sell the house I live in now, which just fits in my retirement budget, will I be able to afford replacement housing anywhere nearby?

I’ve heard the same quandary from friends. Home prices in Western Washington — and pretty much anywhere down the West Coast — are crazy high. And nobody I know wants to move to Arkansas or Oklahoma or pretty much anywhere that’s considered affordable. Most are red states. No thank you.

Because of Barbara’s illness, I retired early, meaning my retirement savings and Social Security income took a hit. The silver lining is that I qualify for housing programs aimed at the low- and middle-income populace.

In choosing a new locale, I have a growing wish list, beyond basic political compatibility. I’m hoping for good parks and trails and maybe a hiking club. A pleasant and walkable downtown with a good coffeehouse or two. I’d like to be near water so I can keep and enjoy my great little boat. I’d like the option of satisfying part-time work as well as volunteer opportunities. Good healthcare. A lively arts scene.

A place where I already have friends would be a big plus.

With the help of friends, I’ve started looking. Daniel and Jean Farber some months ago launched a campaign to get me back to their hometown of Olympia, where I shared a 1970s college-days house with Daniel and fellow students of The Evergreen State College. The latest development: They offered and I accepted a six-week housesitting gig late this fall while they spend quality time with a new grandson in California.

Galley Cat explores the rocky knoll behind the Nuthatch.

The Oly time will help me decide if that’s where I want to live again, with plenty of time to look at the local housing stock and living costs. Galley Cat will accompany me, which is great, though I’m sure she’ll miss roaming the island woods.

No sooner did I announce my Olympia plan than friends on San Juan Island countered with a strategy to keep me in the islands. (It’s nice to be wanted.)

Barbara Marrett and Bill Watson educated me about various affordable-housing projects in and around Friday Harbor. When I visited them recently, Barbara generously drove me around town to inspect every one of those housing developments, including one cluster that consisted of charming old homes that had been lifted from their original sites and barged to Friday Harbor from Victoria, B.C. The San Juan Community Home Trust keeps homes affordable, in part, by selling the house only. Buyers than lease the homesite from the trust at a low monthly rate. There are many such tools to create alternatives to traditional market pricing.

Homes barged from Victoria, B.C., are among affordable housing offered in Friday Harbor.
San Juan Community Home Trust photo

When I had lunch with a new friend on Lopez last week, he told me that Lopez, too, has an affordable-housing project worth a look. While Olympia has its allures, I would love to stay in the San Juans.

So that’s Chapter 1 in the Great Center Island Exit Strategy. More ideas are welcome, shoot me a note. I’ll keep you posted, my friends.

Summer is an island of bliss in a stormy year

Ivory flowers of Oceanspray brighten the June woods on Center Island in the San Juans.

HAPPY SUMMER SOLSTICE on this glorious island day with a perfect 72-degrees Fahrenheit, klieg-lit skies of royal blue and not a single pesky cloud between here and Hurricane Ridge. I hope you’re sharing such dreamy weather.

If the weather gods haven’t convinced you already, the meteorologists will tell you that summer officially began this afternoon at 1:50 p.m. PDT.

The past week on this remote little island nobody’s heard of has been a welcome and peaceful lull between the holiday crowds of Memorial Day and July Fourth, and a welcome diversion from the weird and weirder news of the world. (If you’re a praying person, pray for democracy.) It’s also been a time for me to relax into my summer chores. I’ve planted my deck garden, whacked the weeds on my rocky knoll and replaced more planks in my years-long deck-replacement project. (It’s a bit like painting the Golden Gate Bridge; once done at one end, I’ll start over at the other.)

The wildflowers that gauge the advance of our springtime have mostly come and gone. But June is the season for Oceanspray, the shrub bearing thousands of tiny ivory flowers that in combination give the plant its name, adding a dreamy, creamy sort of surf effect to our sea of evergreens and maples.

For me, the beautiful week on my island is a double dessert in this month’s feast of life. I just returned from a week on Maui with my travel buddy, George, who lives in Seattle. From a comfortable condo in Kihei, we had adventures in snorkeling, beachcombing, trekking ancient lava flows at wild La Perouse Bay, food-truck dining, and luxuriantly lolling around a palm-shaded swimming pool that featured its own cool little waterfall. Even got a tan. It’s good to have a new companion who enjoys travel and adventure as much as I do.

Meanwhile, Galley Cat enjoyed a week’s vacation hosted by Auntie Julie and dog Nigel in their comfortable home in the garden spot known as Brier. Galley and I honor them.

This season makes up a lot for those January days of whistling 50-mph winds and freezing pipes in the San Juans, let me just say. My best wishes to you for good companionship, memorable family fun, idyllic outdoor dining, silly yard games, lazy beach bumming, energetic boat rowing and more this fine summer.

This summer’s deck garden at Nuthatch Cabin.

Sweet roses on a rain-washed island, with thoughts of friends old and new

Despite cool temperatures, wild roses are blooming this Memorial Day in the San Juan Islands.

IT WOULD BE A LOVELY DAY if this were March, I suggested with a smile to fellow islanders as we passed each other on morning walks around our little rock this morning.

But it’s Memorial Day weekend, and I was kitted out in raincoat, Pendleton hat and woolly gloves. It was cold. It was wet. It’s supposed to be late May, for goodness sakes.

The up side: My island, which was already getting crunchy underfoot from a dry spring, is no longer crunchy. We’ve had two much-needed long, soaking rains in the past week. My only worry is that I might have to repeat my usual once-a-year weed whacking, completed last week on the Cantwell little-half-acre.

This Sunday morning rain-washed air as fresh as a tightly furled rosebud lured me outside, and I saw many rosebuds on my walk. Yes, it’s bloom time for the Nootka rose, one of our colorful native plants in the San Juans. The Sea Blush and blue Camas have pretty much come and gone, but for now we have the wild pink roses, and in June we’ll see the creamy, filigree blossoms of Ocean spray.

As I walked, I also met and welcomed our new caretakers, Steve and Nancy, as they circled the island in their red pickup. They are temporary summertime replacements for Rich and Maria, who recently were wooed away by a community association on nearby Blakely Island. Rich, a former state parks ranger, and Maria, a retired school librarian, were wonderful overseers of our island for several years.

Steve and Nancy, who hail from Lake Tahoe, California, these days, have been frequent visitors to friends who have a place on Center Island, so they are well familiar with this little rock. Steve is a retired police chief from the California State University system, and Nancy spent 33 years as an educator in public schools. A teacher and a cop should do OK keeping things in order around here, I expect. But they didn’t seem like disciplinarians, they seemed very friendly.

They will stay through the summer, giving our homeowners association a few more months to find permanent replacements to live in the little blue house next to our clubhouse.

Best wishes for the rest of your Memorial Day weekend, with appreciative thoughts of all the friends and loved ones who’ve come and gone.

When the Web breaks in the islands

Nuthatch Cabin’s old-school, hard-wired communications center: When the wire gets cut, we’re screwed.

OMG, MY INTERNET WAS DOWN FOR A WEEK. Need I say more?

It’s true that many of us spent much of our lifetimes communicating on phones that weren’t any smarter than Bevis or Butthead, and we survived. But that was then.

These days, especially if you live on a remote little rock, home Wi-Fi is what keeps you in touch with the rest of the planet, the World Wide Web that keeps us island spiders fed — with news, with social interaction, with Wordle and the Sunday Crossword, with televised entertainment that streams as easily as the tidal current in Rosario Strait.

Until the Wi-Fi goes dark, as it did about 10 days ago.

As removed from population centers as my Nuthatch Cabin may be, it is served with most of what we call the “mod cons.” Potable water fills the sink when I turn a faucet handle. The toilet flushes. Buried power lines set lights ablaze. Other underground wires bring land-line phone service and, yes, DSL Internet, courtesy of CenturyLink, the Louisiana-based telecom.

Through some convoluted happenstance of old-school technology from the 1990s, never before have my land-line phone and the Internet gone dead at the same time. When it happened this time, I knit my brows.

Already after regular office hours that Thursday, a cell-phone call to CenturyLink led me to a text exchange that I strongly suspect was conducted by an AI entity at the other end. There were too many formulaic responses. Whomever was helping me, I’ll call them “the entity.”

The entity first tried to set a repair appointment a week in the future. It ignored my protests that I depended on my Wi-Fi for keeping linked in so many ways to the outside world. That continued until our text exchange was winding up and I was asked if my problem had been addressed satisfactorily.

“No, the week wait isn’t acceptable,” I texted.

And suddenly the entity found it possible to schedule an appointment for the next day. I explained that I lived on an island with challenging access and offered suggestions for how a repair tech could get here. “I’ll add that to the report,” the entity told me.

All good, it seemed. The problem was that I sat at home all the next day waiting to hear from a repair tech, who was supposed to arrive before 5 p.m. At 4 p.m., CenturyLink texted me that its technician had visited me but was unable to gain needed access to the inside of the premises. Patently false; I hadn’t left home all day. Nobody had showed up.

I got on the phone to a live human being this time. From the accents encountered in several calls, I’m guessing the call center was in India, or maybe Sri Lanka. Bangladesh? Understanding their patois was a challenge. My only comfort was that I could have been trying to wade through a Louisiana drawl thick as gumbo.

Surprise, they now told me, 24 hours after my first report: The problem had been identified as an area outage, affecting more than just my residence. No, they couldn’t say how wide an area was affected. They had no idea when it might be fixed.

That was late Friday, May 10. The call center was closing for the weekend. I would wait, vaguely hoping someone was working on Center Island’s outage. And over the weekend I would watch old DVDs instead of streaming the latest from Netflix. I would walk across my island to check my email at the clubhouse, which is served by Elon Musk’s satellite-based Starlink Internet. (As much as I’ve tried to ‘X’-out Musk from my life, I ruled out switching to Starlink only when I learned that not only would it cost me $25 more per month, but I would have to invest in $600 worth of equipment. And neighbors told me that tall firs on our side of the island make for poor Starlink reception anyway.)

Monday morning I phoned South Asia again. Another new development: My area outage had been repaired, they now claimed. But my phone and Internet are still dead, I protested.

OK, we’ll set up a new repair visit, my customer-service rep said. For the end of the week. “For tomorrow,” I insisted. OK, for tomorrow. Not once did I hear an apology for Friday’s no-show.

Just out of curiosity, I phoned the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission consumer complaints office, which oversees telecoms. Legally, I could file a complaint two business days after a phone outage, a staffer told me. That meant the end of Monday. But CenturyLink had a poor record of quickly resolving complaints — it could take months — and the commission’s enforcement powers seemed weak.

Tuesday morning I finally heard from the repairman, a gentleman named Armando whose 360 area code indicated he was actually calling from this hemisphere. I told him I’d heard that several of my island neighbors had also lost their CenturyLink service. That was news to him. Mine was the only service request, he said.

He’d secured a plane ride that day to neighboring Decatur Island, which he would have to visit first. Apparently there’s some sort of switchbox on Decatur that controls service to Center Island.

Then he’d need a boat ride to Center Island. That was a problem. My boat was on its trailer, out of the water, and a fluke of the tides was such that water would not be high enough all week to use our launch ramp in daylight hours. I suggested he hire a water taxi. He was unenthusiastic.

I hung up, thought about it for a minute, and phoned a neighbor to ask a favor. His boat was at the dock, and the ride across the bay to Decatur was only 5 minutes. He agreed to help, so I called back to Armando, who said he’d probably be ready for a lift in 20 minutes. He would phone to let me know.

Two hours later, after more than one try, I got through to Armando again. Oh, it appears that all Center Island customers have lost their service, he told me. (Surprise.)

And here’s some irony. It happens that, as a result of the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, San Juan County-based Rock Island Communications won grants to expand fiber-optic broadband service to 1,000 island residents, including us folks on Center and Decatur islands. The digging of trenches and laying of cable had already begun on Decatur Island. And guess why CenturyLink’s old-school DSL service went out?

Yep, while laying lines, the forces of new-and-improved cut the old cable. Oops.

Armando told me he didn’t know where the cable was severed, but that the problem was clearly on Decatur. The good news: He didn’t need a boat ride. But he offered no optimism for a repair.

Bad, bad news, I thought. Why would CenturyLink now want to spend potentially big bucks to fix a broken line serving only a handful of customers on a little island nobody’s heard of? Admittedly, my neighbors and I will all likely abandon their antiquated service as soon as broadband switches on (at $10 less per month, with much faster uploads and downloads).

Commiserating with another Internet-less neighbor at our clubhouse, I learned that CenturyLink had scheduled him for a service call the next day, Wednesday. I wondered if that offered any hope.

I guess it did. Around 1 p.m. Wednesday, my long-silent land-line phone rang with a loud electronic burble. “It lives!” I shouted to Galley Cat as I ran to pick up the call. Leaping frantically from the cozy bed atop her kitty condo, Galley apparently didn’t share my thrill. (She’s always been a Luddite.)

Armando was calling from Decatur Island. The broken cable was repaired. Service was restored. It was unexpected good news.

On reflection, I realize that while Internet is nice to have, I could survive without it. Just as I did for more than half my life.

Meanwhile, I had re-watched a bunch of old “West Wing” episodes on DVD. I love Joe Biden, but God, I wish Jed Bartlet was on the ballot this year.

Cart blanche: Rebuild frees islander of too many treks up the dock

The rebuilt cart on the dock at Center Island: a key link in my island’s transportation network, ready for more seasons of service.

WHEN YOU LIVE ON A REMOTE ISLAND with no shops or garbage pick-up, all your groceries must be transported up a dock and all your trash gets packed the other way. You really come to appreciate a good dock cart.

Anybody who’s had a boat in a marina knows of what I speak: the boxy two-wheeled conveyances with tires the size of a small bicycle’s, usually pushed by a large, U-shaped metal handle. Often capable of carrying two Rubbermaid totes and maybe a Trader Joe frozen-food bag. They do their job handily. No big deal.

But when the cart comes in a large, economy size, carrying two additional totes and maybe a couple of 5-gallon gas cans as well, you fall in love. Such Cadillacs of conveyance halve your required treks up and down the dock ramp, which on a minus tide can almost require ropes and a belaying harness. If you’ve just arrived home from a Costco run, kitted out with a six-month supply of pasta and several half-gallon jars of Adams peanut butter, the unashamed among us dash off the water taxi, pass up the “normal”-size carts and nab the stretch-limo of grocery transport.

For years, Center Island’s “A” Dock has had such a cart. For years, it has been slowly falling to pieces.

The big cart was home-built long ago of thin plywood. Had the cart ever seen stain or paint, such protectants had long ago thrown in the towel against Northwest winters and retired to Arizona. The plywood’s raw, gray edges had started shredding like store-bought hash browns. On parts of the metal chassis, rust was holding the rust together. Our island’s caretaker kept up a brave campaign of replacing nuts and bolts, evidenced by shiny bits of metal among the oxidized. But as of late the cart’s front panel was falling out, threatening to dump into Read’s Bay one’s warehouse-store flagon of Mrs. Butterworth’s or body bag of Cap’n Crunch.

In places, rust was holding the rust together on the old dock cart.

For ease of reference here, we’ll call the big cart Otto (preferred pronouns: “It” and “Its”). Last fall, with winter looming, on a whim I asked Center Island caretaker Rich if I might tackle an Otto rebuild over the cold, long months ahead. It would be something to do, of benefit to me and all my neighbors. Rich enthusiastically nodded.

Then, you know how things go. I got busy. A bunch of holidays came along. Winter was shorter than usual, I’m certain of it. By April, Caretaker Rich had announced a pending move to another island, where pay was better and duties lighter. (These remote islands-nobody’s-heard-of can be cutthroat when it comes to poaching caretakers.)

Meanwhile, Otto was a wreck. Nuts were rusting to dust. L-braces once holding panels together twirled loosely as screws gave way. I felt bad I hadn’t fulfilled my aspiration and hated for Rich to depart thinking me a slacker. In late April, I queried him if I could take Otto out of service for a couple of weeks and proceed with the makeover. The nod was even quicker.

I wasn’t talking about a refresh. That elderly plywood needed full replacement. I hoped enough of the metal chassis would be reusable once sanded and given new coats of Rust-Oleum.

With gorgeous spring weather arriving, I loaded Otto into an island truck and transplanted it cross-island to the deck outside Nuthatch Cabin. Outfitted in my grubbiest old paint-splattered jeans and T-shirt, like a surgeon’s scrubs after 48 hours of brain surgery, I began the dissection.

With a can of WD-40 at my elbow, I twiddled and twisted, grunted and groaned. I removed a brimming jarful of old nuts, bolts and washers, which I set aside for triage as to possible reuse. Several bolts sheared off with a flick of my socket wrench. A saltwater environment does that.

The old plywood I set aside for a trip to the Lopez Island dump.

It was a 10-day project, involving three boat trips to the Lopez hardware store/lumberyard. The new plywood was $70. The dump bill, $15. The new nuts and bolts added up quickly, plus about eight cans of spray paint. Otto’s rusty u-shaped handle – already splinted in two places – was a write-off so I hopped on Amazon and ordered a new 1½-inch-diameter aluminum handle made by a manufacturer of industrial hand trucks.

Once Otto’s old metal frame was fully exposed, two corners looked like the work of rust-spewing moths – with more holes than solid surface. I fired up the Sawzall and excised those ends with a few moments of shrieking metal-saw demolition. With sharp edges sanded away, enough solid framing remained to support the cart. The axle and wheels were in good shape.

I painted the new wood in appetizing tones of green – “sage” and “oregano” – and tacked protective rubber edging to the plywood’s perimeter. Metal parts were sanded and sprayed with a rust-transforming undercoat topped by a rust-blocking Hunter-green enamel. To guard against theft, Caretaker Rich suggested I label the cart, which usually means scrawling it with the letters “CIA” (for Center Island Association). I chose to make it friendlier, daubing “Welcome to Center Island” on the end panel. Affixing our island’s name decreases the chance that Otto gets pirated to a neighboring port.

The last step was to install the hefty aluminum handle. Finally, without ceremony, last Friday I deposited the rebuilt cart at the head of A dock, ready for a new lifetime of grocery grunting and trash toting.

All seemed good. Then, Saturday afternoon, when neighbors joined me for a sun-drenched happy hour on the Nuthatch’s deck, I learned that another friend had a hair-raising mishap with the rebuilt cart. As he wheeled three heavy bags of trash down the steep dock ramp during an extreme low tide, the cart’s new handle worked free from its metal anchor loops. The loaded cart careened down the ramp.

Thank god, the ramp was clear. Nobody was hurt. Nothing ended up in the bay.

Another islander had subsequently reattached the handle to its anchor loops with metal screws, whereas I had relied on pressure from neoprene firmly packed inside the straps. The neoprene gave a solid seal with no wobble, fine for use on level ground but apparently not up to heavy loading on a precipitous ramp. Oops.

I tossed and turned that night, haunted by the fact that my good deed nearly ended in disaster. Finally, I set an alarm for early rising and resolved to inspect the cart first thing Sunday, with tools in hand.

By 7:30 I was in the island workshop adding two more anchor straps to the cart’s handle, satisfied that the unidentified Samaritan’s repair job looked good but convinced that overkill wasn’t bad in this case. While at it, I added half a dozen more bolts and an extra L-brace to reinforce the cart at every edge. Once bitten…

As the rebuilt cart has gotten more use, neighbors have voiced smiling appreciation. It’s the island way. Many pitch in to keep life chugging along on our little rock.

And saving extra trips up the dock with my Costco hauls will keep me smiling, too.

BONUS PHOTOS: It’s wildflower season on the rocky knoll behind Nuthatch Cabin. Blue Camas flowers, above. Below: A white inflorescence of Death Camas — toxic, but pretty — among the purple/pink of Sea Blush.

The morning pause that refreshes

I enjoy coffee and toast with avocado and walnuts on the deck at Nuthatch Cabin, poised to take in an avian aria or two.

DO YOU EVER GET JADED BY BEAUTY YOU SEE EVERY DAY? In the Louvre of your mind, do you walk listlessly past Mona Lisa’s winsome smile? In your inner Florence, do you yawn at David’s washboard stomach? On a pristine spring morning in Seattle, does snowy Rainier not merit an “Oh, look, the Mountain is out!”

I had approached that enervating ennui on my little island of perfection. Daily routines had dulled senses and blinded my eye. But a pleasant phone chat with my brother Doug reminded me of his practice whenever he visits. He starts every day with coffee out on my deck to hear the dawn chorus. His example inspired me this morning.

If you’re not my neighbor the Mad Birder or one of his fellow travelers, you might not know: “Dawn Chorus” is the bird-lover’s label for the cacophonous birdsong that erupts with the sun’s rise in these warming months. It comprises the collective theme songs of scores of early birds determined to get their worms.

A nice thing about my island is we have so many birds that the chorus continues well into mid-morning, meaning I could catch today’s performance even after getting my required eight hours.

With no neighbors at home — the Mad Birder and his lovely wife are off on a madcap fishing trip in Nevada — I wasn’t shy about wrapping up in my bathrobe and slippers as I headed out to the Adirondack chair. In my hands was a breakfast of avocado toast and fresh drip coffee. It was 44 degrees F. outside. I was glad I’d pulled on long johns and that the coffee was blazing hot. Behind me, the sun was just rising over my rocky knoll to light up the treetops around me.

Sure enough, the birdies were belting out songs like Julie Andrews romping an edelweiss-laden Alp.

One virtuoso song, full of joyful trilling and punctuated by rising and falling scales broadcast at perfect pitch, turned my head and prompted a smile from my toast-munched mouth.

I regret that I’m not skilled at identifying many birds by their song, though I am often curious. My eyes scanned the treetops, finally spying a light-colored bird high at the tiptop of a dead fir, 100 feet up where the rising April sun was just warming the chill air.

He was too distant to identify by sight, but I relished the song, imagining the view from high up, and almost feeling the golden glow on my face as I lifted my eyes to the cloudless azure sky. I was the only human hearing his song, but I didn’t own it; the thrill belonged to this island and these woods.

Who was this bird of lilting forest melody? I couldn’t resist. I rose from my deck chair and tiptoed quickly inside, as if the bird would somehow hear me from that dizzying height. I returned with my binoculars. But the singer was gone, like a golden dream barely remembered after waking.

The entertainment wasn’t over, however. Countless songbirds zoomed and swooped in seeming games of tag among the fir limbs and maple catkins. Minutes later the singing bird returned to its perch. My high-powered lenses showed a Purple Finch (my best effort at identification), his rose-tinted head colored scarlet by the klieg-light sun. Besides the birdsong, calm and silence filled my woods but for the faintest background static, almost subliminal, of a passenger jet writing a contrail in the blue heavens. Some 30,000 feet up, its ear-budded transcontinental travelers knew nothing of this morning’s sweet aria from 100 feet above the forest duff.

With the bountifully-lunged singer in sight, I crept back inside for my camera with its 600-millimeter zoom. As I returned to my chair, a nearby nuthatch honked in merriment, taunting that the finch had again taken wing.

I kept watch, struggling for a photo of my elusive Pavarotti of the forest crown. He alighted atop another tree, but was brimming with springtime energy, resting only long enough for me to grab my camera, raise it to my eye, and … focus on an empty branch. Finally, after many tries, I caught a photo.

After many tries, my long-lens camera caught this lustily warbling songbird high atop a fir on a bluebird-sky Center Island morning.

Back atop the dead fir, another finch joined the first. Falling from the perch together they defied gravity, fluttering up, down and sideways like frenetic tiger swallowtails. The start of a hot date? Or two males in a chest-thumping challenge for territory? “Want me to scram? Who’s gonna make me? You and your mother?”

Their struggle against Earth’s pull reminded me of the classic aviator’s poem, “High Flight” (which, Wikipedia tells me, U.S. Air Force Academy students must memorize):

“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds — and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence…”

It was a good start to another day on this small island nobody’s heard of.

Fairy slippers lead parade of island wildflowers

A Calypso Orchid, aka Fairy Slipper, opens like a peacock’s tail among the forest duff behind Nuthatch Cabin.

A MILD WINTER MEANS EARLY WILDFLOWERS in my beautiful San Juan Islands. Easter weekend brought the first blooms on my back-40 of a perennial favorite, Calypso Orchid, also known (because of its tiny size) as Fairy Slipper.

The fairies that visit Center Island seem a careless lot, leaving more and more of their delicate magenta slippers behind every spring.

Visiting friend George and your humble scribe, on James Island

The Oregon grape and buttercups are blooming, too, on my rocky knoll. And when a visiting friend, George Moua, and I hopped aboard WeLike and buzzed over for a sack lunch and hike on delightful James Island on Saturday, I was amazed to see a Giant White Fawn Lily in bloom alongside a trail. Usually these starburst-shaped flowers wait until May to add a splash of delight to our forest understory. Another hiker had seen blooming blue Camas, another surprise at this early date. George, a Seattleite who shares my love of the outdoors, was lucky to encounter such early treats on this, his first visit to the San Juans.

Coming soon: The diatom-sized pink flowers of Sea Blush will roll like an ocean wave across the curvaceous landscape of my knoll, accented by ivory florescence of Death Camas (there’s a fun name), royal blue Camas and more white Fawn Lilies. It’s Center Island’s own grand floral parade. Time to get the lawn chairs ready.

Springing into adventure

Daffodils flaunt their gold in the Skagit Valley, as snow still frosts the Cascade foothills.

WELCOME TO SPRING in the Pacific Northwest. We islanders are thankful that winter is past, the winds have calmed and the daffodils and wild currant are in bloom. Time to get out the rake and broom and spruce things up on my rock.

Galley Cat and I celebrated the season with a road trip to see old friends in Port Orchard and Olympia this week. We caught the height of the daffodil bloom in the commercial fields of the Skagit Valley, and enjoyed some pristine days of sunshine and temperatures flirting with 70 degrees.

Friends Dave and Jill Kern, formerly of Vancouver, where Dave and I worked together at The Columbian newspaper, welcomed us to their home south of Port Orchard. They treated me to beautiful walks at Manchester State Park, not far from their home, and Theler Wetlands nature preserve, at Belfair on the southern end of Hood Canal. We gawked at fabulous views of the snowy Olympic Mountains like I haven’t seen since my family lived in Bremerton at the turn of the century. (Sounds weird to say that, but those of you who remember Y2K know what I mean.)

A highlight, too, was celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with a community potluck near their home at the Olalla Community Club, a classic old fraternal hall dating to about 1906. We feasted on Irish stew, scrumptious soda bread and green Jell-o salad, among other tasty dishes brought by neighbors, and enjoyed Irish tunes and dancing by a group called Magical Strings, working their magic on a gorgeous hand-crafted Celtic harp, hammered dulcimer, button accordion, concertina, fiddle and more. Best St. Patrick’s Day bash I remember in a long time.

Mount Rainier and Budd Inlet at sunrise, as seen from the Farbers’ front deck.

Daniel and Jean Farber welcomed us to their place in Olympia, where we got to enjoy sunrises and sunsets with a glorious view of Mount Rainier and Budd Inlet. Daniel, whom I’ve known since high school and was best man when Barbara and I married, took me on two glorious hikes: McLane Creek Nature Trail, and the trail to the Eld Inlet beach at The Evergreen State College, where we earned bachelor degrees together in the late 1970s. The Farbers and I ate salmon, played games and generally celebrated life.

Galley and I are back at Nuthatch Cabin now, readying for a weekend visit by daughter Lillian and her partner, Chris, which is always a treat. So it’s time for me to get the place looking its best. Happy springtime!

Daniel on the Eld Inlet beach, part of the campus of our alma mater, The Evergreen State College. Daniel remembers digging clams on this beach as part of biology studies, and hiking here with friends for a midnight skinny dip. Brrrr.

Alone again (naturally)

February sun glitters on Lopez Island’s Fisherman Bay during my Friday escape from The Rock.

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.)

A whimsical sign crafted from castoffs welcomes patrons to the Lopez Dump.

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.

Coffee and a good book on the deck at Isabel’s.

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.

Dog walkers navigate the isthmus between Fisherman Bay and San Juan Channel, at Otis Perkins Park.

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.

A Friday Harbor-bound ferry rounds Shaw Island, as seen from Otis Perkins Park.

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.