Relieved to be home on my rock after Brian’s Dreadful December

AT LEAST IT DIDN’T HAPPEN on my remote little island nobody’s heard of. No helicopter evacs were involved, thank God.

That’s the best thing I can say about my recent up-close-and-personal encounter with America’s emergency health-care system.

Your faithful scribe and cat, happy to be back at the Nuthatch.

Loyal readers, if you were wondering about my long absence from the Reef, it was because I was busy living Brian’s Dreadful December.

When last we shared screen time, I was in the midst of a six-week housesitting stint in the lovely bayview home of friends Daniel and Jean in Olympia. In fact, after the presidential election I had resolved to make Olympia my next home.

That housesitting assignment was to conclude December 15. My plan was to return to my island for a week before hotfooting it back down the highway to spend Christmas with Portland friends Ken and Kate. Their daughter had orchestrated a plan for Christmas Eve dinner at Portland’s posh Ritz-Carlton hotel, followed by a couple of nights for family and friends at her Oregon Coast holiday home.

For me, all those holiday plans began to unravel on Friday the 13th (just like a bad movie).

After three days of serious digestive dysfunction in Olympia, I was on the phone at 7 in the morning to an old college friend — Kathy Pruitt, to whom I’m forever indebted — begging a ride to the nearest Emergency Room.

I had managed to pick up a nasty intestinal bug that over the course of the week had dehydrated me such that my blood pressure registered just 60/30 when they cuffed me in the St. Peter Hospital E.R. Never had I seen so many medical professionals swoop around me so quickly with armloads of I.V. bags, tubes and needles.

I was in the hospital four days before I.V. hydration, a liquid diet and a course of serious antibiotics set me right.

The lost time canceled my December return to Center Island. After a couple days of convalescence with my now-returned Olympia hosts, I packed up Galley Cat and drove straight to my Portland friends’ floating home on the Portland shore of the Columbia River.

On a back channel of the Columbia in Portland, my friends’ floating home is moored behind their sailboat, outlined in lights.

We had a nice few days. Toured a collection of Paul McCartney’s photos at Portland’s art museum. Shopped a holiday bazaar. Had a lovely little solstice party.

Then my digestion went south again. At 7 in the morning on Christmas Eve, I asked my hosts to drive me to another E.R.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the bug I’d suffered had a common side-effect: ulcers of the bowel. Admitted to a hospital in Vancouver, Washington, I got transfusions of five units of blood, then underwent emergency surgery on Christmas Day to stop the bleeding from a duodenal ulcer. Four hours on the table with only a local anesthetic while a surgeon probed my arteries. Ack.

Five more days in a hospital. My holidays were a culinary blur of green Jell-O and steaming yellow broth rumored to have once met a chicken. A far (and gastronomically anguished) cry from the Ritz.

Throughout the ordeal, my chums in Olympia and Portland showed me what true friendship means. The day after Christmas, daughter Lillian flew out from her new home of Philadelphia. Three weeks of her unsparing help and support was a godsend as I convalesced, first at my friends’ homes down south and finally at the Seattle-area home of my ever-generous sister-in-law Julie. I struggled to overcome stamina-robbing anemia and low blood-counts. In a quick trip to Center Island last weekend Lillian helped me transport my belongings and a carload of groceries homeward before I had to return to Seattle for final medical exams.

Tuesday night I drove Lillian to catch a Philly-bound plane. Wednesday, already halfway into January, I finally returned on my own to Nuthatch Cabin for some long-anticipated nesting and recovery time with Galley Cat.

With temperatures stuck in the 40s here, last summer’s fuchsias are still blooming on my deck. Blazes in the wood stove cheer the cabin nightly. Awakening mornings in my loft, I look out to watch each day unveil itself, whether wrapped in mist or warmed by the sun’s first lemony fingers caressing the treetops.

I’m getting back into my fitness routine, including a daily half-hour on the stationary bike. So far, so good. (Thursday I included two naps in my day’s itinerary. So I’m not overdoing.)

I’m working to boost my hemoglobin count, including another in a lineup of steak dinners tonight. Red meat isn’t my dietary norm but it helps bolster my blood, along with iron supplements.

For now, Galley Cat and I are both just glad to be home on our island. She’s back hunting the mice that live under the woodshed. I’ve returned to pleasant afternoons tapping the keyboard in my writing hut. Day by day, I’m encountering the rock’s few winter neighbors and chatting them up after my long absence. Sunny skies and coppery sunsets are a healing balm.

For now, I want to pull up the drawbridge and never leave. I hope your January offers comforts as dear.

Capital times in Olympia

Mount Rainier dominates the horizon above downtown Olympia, as seen from the West Bay Drive home I’m housesitting.

SO WHAT’S HAPPENING IN OLY TOWN? It’s December already, my six weeks of housesitting time is winding down, and somehow I got distracted by the news of November.

Here I sit looking out from West Bay Drive to the snowy majesty of Mount Rainier looming over downtown on a blue-sky afternoon. Other than trying to ignore the news in recent weeks, I’ve had some nice visits with friends and family and gotten to know this town again.

Some of my visitors probably won’t believe Olympia can be sunny and that Rainier looms large here. We’ve had our share of socked-in days of featureless low clouds, especially on days when I’ve had visitors. My buddy R.J., whom I call the Unitarian Librarian, was here from Moscow, Idaho, for three gloomy days in late November. He’ll never believe the sun shines on the state capital. Same for yesterday when longtime friends Dave and Jill from Port Orchard came for lunch and a genial hike around the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. Despite the glum day, we enjoyed sighting two Bald Eagles in the top of a tall fir. Among troops of migrating waterbirds on the tideflats, a flock of maybe a hundred Dunlins performed their signature aerial acrobatics in which the flock navigated amazing hair-trigger zigzags above the Nisqually tide flats, seeming to disappear in thin air and then astonishingly reappearing on a different tack. Worth the trip!

But today I’m on my own, and the day is blue and beautiful. I won’t complain.

With R.J., I revisited McLane Creek to see the spawning salmon. It was a new and mesmerizing experience for my friend, who grew up on a farm near Spokane. Because he’d not explored Olympia before, I took him to the Capitol building, thinking we’d poke our nose inside briefly. But at the entry we met a tour guide named Terry. “Are you here for the 1 o’clock tour?” he asked. We shook our heads. “Would you like a tour? It’s exactly 1 o’clock and nobody else is here.”

A Tiffany-created chandelier hangs inside the Capitol dome.

So purely through serendipity, we got a delightful private tour of the Capitol. I had spent a lot of time in that building during a reporting internship in college days, but on this visit I learned much more about it. For example, I never knew that there are 42 steps leading to the entrance, celebrating the fact that Washington was the 42nd state admitted to the Union. I never knew that the giant chandelier hanging inside the dome was crafted by Tiffany (as were light fixtures throughout the building), or that the Capitol campus was designed by the Olmsted Brothers, famed landscapers whose father was one of the lead designers of New York’s Central Park.

I especially enjoyed stepping into the foyer of the governor’s office, where huge portraits of past governors looked down on visitors. Caught up in a moment of wonder, I recounted to tour-guide Terry my “six degrees of separation” links to a handful of those governors. “Arthur Langlie’s granddaughter is a friend of mine. And my daughter just finished working at Rosellini’s Bakery in Seattle, run by a descendant of Albert Rosellini. Dan Evans was president of my college and I got to know him a bit in my tenure as editor of the college newspaper. And I had dealings with Dixy Lee Ray when I interned here.” It was a reminder that I am definitely a Washingtonian.

The day after R.J. returned to Idaho, my daughter Lillian and our friend Lux arrived to help me celebrate Thanksgiving. We enjoyed several days of exploring the town, where Lux had grown up and Lillian had gone to college. Both enjoyed seeing Olympia looking like it’s on an upswing, they said. Some boarded up storefronts remain, but new shops and eateries are moving in along with more residents as new downtown apartment buildings have gone up.

The mist-shrouded Capitol dome rises above Capitol Lake in Olympia.

After a misty morning walk around Capitol Lake, we joined in a fun all-day collaboration cooking our Thanksgiving feast. Meat-eschewers Lil and Lux’s main dish was a Trader Joe creation, a Vegan Breaded Turkey-less Roast with Gravy, while I roasted my first-ever Rock Cornish Game Hen. Side dishes included roasted Brussels sprouts and golden beets, sage-crazy stuffing with walnuts and celery, mashed potatoes, mashed rutabaga, and Lillian’s specialty, luscious mushroom gravy. Her rich and delicious pumpkin pie with plant-based whipped cream concluded our evening’s repast.

Lillian’s pumpkin pie, delicious despite a slight crust malfunction.

For years, my daughter and I reserved a special day to go Christmas shopping together at Seattle’s Pike Place Market. But with her imminent departure for a new home in Philadelphia (prompted by a new job for her partner), we decided Friday was perfect to go shopping in downtown Olympia. We enjoyed hours nosing about a delightful local bookstore, the Traditions shop specializing in fair-trade artisanal imports, plus several lively boutiques and specialty stores. We ambled back up the hill to West Bay Drive laden with holiday packages and good secrets.

That afternoon, the three of us jumped in the car and headed out Highway 101 to Kennedy Creek, another well-known salmon-spawning stream. We got to chat with two knowledgeable docents there who told us this year brought a larger than usual run of 40,000 chum salmon to Kennedy Creek. The only downside, one of the experts told us: In their effort to find good nesting areas among the pebbly creek bottom, later-arriving fish tend to destroy the egg nests built by earlier arrivals. A bittersweet ending for all the effort these fish expend in returning from the ocean to the freshwater stream of their birth.

I’ve 12 days left here before friends Daniel and Jean return from visiting with their new grandson in California. I have one more special dinner on the calendar, with an old college housemate. I’ll put a bit more energy into looking at housing, and maybe I’ll take in a Christmas show before I go.

Then it’s back to Center Island for me and Galley Cat for a week before I join Portland friends for my first Christmas without family around me. But that’s really a misstatement; my Portland friends Ken and Kate are really family to me, as are so many others I’ve mentioned. Happy holidays to you all.

I’m thinking Oly for my future

Autumn color helps frame the Capitol dome in Olympia. At 287 feet high, it is the tallest self-supporting masonry dome in the United States. Dome trivia: Washington, D.C.’s U.S. Capitol dome, made of cast iron, is just one foot taller.

THIS DECISION WAS MADE FOR ME, by millions of unbelievably misguided American voters.

Until November 6, I was uncertain where my next move would be after more than six years of living full-time on delightful Center Island.

The morning the presidential election result became evident, I knew Olympia would be my new address. It was as clear to me as the town’s famous artesian water.

While I hate to leave the lovely San Juan Islands and my friends there, I was already considering this. I need more social interaction and community involvement than I get on an island with only 15 winter residents. Even the “big town” of Friday Harbor feels too removed from the action now.

I’m currently housesitting for friends for six weeks at their comfortable Olympia home overlooking Budd Inlet and downtown. It’s not my first time here, and I’ve always liked the town. I got my B.A. here at The Evergreen State College in the 1970s, and I still have college friends in town. My late parents chose this as a retirement community, so I visited many times in the 1990s. My daughter was part of Evergreen’s Class of 2013, so I was here for dorm move-ins, parental visits, and graduation.

This election was a sea change. As soon as I knew the outcome, I was certain I wanted to be in this little center of power in Blue America.

Here I can work for the American resistance. For now, Washington state, and its capital, remain something of a refuge. While the national results were not what I chose, our state “had a very good election,” Pramila Jayapal, my congresswoman when I lived in Seattle, told an online national gathering of almost 150,000 resisters a couple days after the election. “If anything, the state went bluer.”

Visitors play on the Rainbow Rails, a decorated stretch of abandoned railroad trestle on Olympia’s Budd Inlet. When someone repainted the rail ties black and white during last June’s Pride Month in what some labeled a hate crime against the LGBTQ community, volunteers immediately stepped forth with paint brushes to renew the rainbow colors.

Every statewide office went to a Democrat on November 5, and the Dems’ control of both houses of the Legislature grew by a few seats. The new governor-elect, Attorney General Bob Ferguson, was a national leader in filing largely successful legal challenges to the blunders of the first Trump Administration.

That galvanized my thinking. For me, Olympia can be a bastion of kinder, smarter public life. I will support the resistance by supporting this community, doing what I can to make it stronger.

If I live in Olympia, I can testify before the Legislature when good laws are being debated. It’s familiar ground: As a college student, I interned with a public television news program covering a legislative session. Living in Oly, I can add my boots on the ground to the causes of publicly minded nonprofits. When the red hats come to town, I will join the defenders of democracy waving signs on the Capitol steps. I can be a noisy old fart working for the good guys.

The choice seems simple now. This is a time and place, like 1930s Europe, when nobody gets the luxury of sitting innocently on the sidelines. My physical move will take some time — a year, or even two. But our free nation is under siege. For the moment the bozos who want us under their thumb have the edge.

It might be a battle for the rest of my life. It’s time to get started.

Salmon stream eases worldly woes

Chum salmon face many obstacles as they struggle upstream to spawn in Thurston County’s McLane Creek.

THERE’S NOTHING LIKE WATCHING salmon battle their way upstream to spawn to help take your mind off a disastrous national election.

Friday, with late-afternoon sunshine beckoning, I grabbed the camera, jumped in the car and headed out Delphi Road, southwest of Olympia, to McLane Creek Nature Trail, on the edge of Capitol State Forest. It was another step in my quest to get better acquainted with Olympia and Thurston County during my six-week housesitting sabbatical from Center Island.

McLane Creek feeds into Mud Bay, one of Puget Sound’s southernmost fingers, crossed by U.S. Highway 101 west of the state capital. The area is a lush and peaceful patch of forest, pond and stream any time of year. But on most November days the creek is asplash with hundreds of chum salmon with only one thing on their mind: making little salmon.

A determined salmon lunges through shallows in McLane Creek.

Indeed, you hear splashing well before the trail reaches the creek, because it’s a shallow stream that requires the big, determined fish to waggle their entire bodies to lunge ahead over pebbly shoals, sometimes zooming forward like a Seafair hydroplane. It adds a distinctive percussionary note to the lilting stream song.

Ferns grow from mossy maple trees along McLane Creek.

Along the looping mile or so of boardwalk and trail, admire the fuzzy cattails edging a pond that teems with newts and waterfowl. Frogs chirp and hiccup in the forest understory and flowing ferns decorate the mossy trunks of towering maples.

A footbridge over the creek offers a prime salmon-viewing spot. You’ll see (and smell! ) both living and dead fish. By the time the big fish make it this far up the stream — almost three miles from the Sound — they are battered and exhausted. After the females lay their eggs and the males fertilize them with their milt, both die. Their rotting bodies feed other wildlife and fertilize the forest.

Spending an hour marveling at this phenomenon up close was a pleasant stress-reliever. If you need to get your mind off the troublesome future, I recommend it: Go find peace in nature.

Sunday, November 10, is the annual McLane Creek Chum Salmon and Cider Celebration, 11:30 a.m.- 2 p.m. Enjoy hot cider and snacks while learning from trained Salmon Stewards. There will be a craft activity for kids. Free admission; Discover Pass required. 5044 Delphi Road S.W., Olympia.

Click on this video to see and hear the drama of McLane Creek at spawning season, with salmon both living and dead.

Letter from Olympia on Nov. 4

One of my first activities in Olympia: joining a men’s hiking group on a pleasant autumn trek on Sequalichew Creek, near Dupont.

THIS ISLANDER IS ON SABBATICAL, but my island’s wild winds have followed me to Washington State’s capital city.

Here’s my quick day-before-the-election report.

I awakened today to lashing rain. Fierce winds are ripping golden leaves from the autumn trees and prepping them for winter. Lights in the house are occasionally flashing here on Oly’s West Bay Drive, where I look out through a bank of picture windows to Budd Inlet and the cityscape of sailboat masts, new apartment buildings and a broad swath of state offices. I’m house-sitting for six weeks for my friends Daniel and Jean.

I’ve been here a week. Took a hike with Daniel’s all-male hiking group, a bunch of gray-headed guys with tales to tell, many of them from influential positions in state government. Took a long solo walk down Olympia’s Fourth Avenue, past Bohemian coffee shops and cafes, more than one “junque” store selling other people’s discarded treasures, and a few boarded-up storefronts. But there’s also the elegant new Assyrian restaurant, and the soon-to-open holiday skating rink with a view of the stately capitol dome. Ended up at Olympia Coffee Roasters, where I plunked down 20 bucks for a bag of delicious Ethiopian Abore medium-roast beans (“flavors of berries, chocolate and cream”).

I’m here, in part, to decide if this is where I want to live next. Part of my long-term Center Island exit strategy. I’ve joined a gym. I’ll go to local events and shows. I’ll get reacquainted with the community where I went to college almost 50 years ago.

But I’ve another objective in writing today.

Tomorrow is Election Day, the final day to cast our votes in the most important election of our lives. A day when we choose to keep our freedoms or give them up to an unbalanced, narcissistic tyrant. A day when America chooses to give democracy another chance or gives up on everything everybody has fought for and lets chaos reign.

It’s that simple. We’re like the Germans in the early 1930s. The choice we make tomorrow, for good or bad, will shake our world.

I’ve done what I can to help the good guys. I’ve written 250 get-out-the-vote letters to swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. I’ve donated $1,500 of my meager bank account to the Harris campaign.

I’m not looking for credit or thanks for that. But I am asking loyal readers to stop and think: Have you cast your ballot yet? Has everyone in your family cast their ballot? Does anybody you know need help or encouragement to cast their ballot? This is not an election to sit out. If there’s anybody you know who needs help or persuasion, today is the day. Please write or call your friends, family and neighbors. Make sure they’ve voted.

Keep up the hope. Keep up the optimism. But, please, do what you can for the good guys.

Then we’ll all keep our fingers crossed.

Thank you,

Brian

The social butterfly of autumn

Your loyal correspondent tops out on a 700-foot+ dune in Great Sand Dunes National Park in southern Colorado. North America’s tallest dunes build from windblown grains of sand at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, seen in the background. Photo by Douglas Cantwell.

ISLAND LIFE CAN BE LONELY AT TIMES, you’ve heard me say. With Center Island’s year-round population hovering around 20, the social life has its limitations.

But, boy, loneliness hasn’t been an issue for me this fall.

So far, my autumn has been a dizzying — and delightful — whirlwind of visits by family and old friends, along with travel to visit family and friends in locales ranging from Orcas Island to Moscow, Idaho, to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Hilary, Christi and me on Center Island. I love visitors, and I’ve had a few good visits lately.

It began with my Labor Day outing to Sucia Island with daughter Lillian, closely followed by a visit here by Hilary Hilscher and Christi Norman, two longtime friends. I first got to know them through their association with Audubon Washington, for which they drove all over the state together in a sort of “Thelma and Louise Go Birding” partnership about 20 years ago to create the Great Washington State Birding Trail. Laid out in a set of seven detailed and beautifully illustrated maps, the Birding Trail comprises the state’s best bird-watching sites. As outdoors editor for The Seattle Times, I piggybacked on their great work with a regular newsfeature called “Birders’ Top Spots,” spotlighting sites from their maps. (Six of the seven maps, published between 2002 and 2011, are still available to order online here for $4.95 apiece).

Hilary and Christi, who both live with their husbands in the greater Puget Sound area, have been regular readers of “Cantwell’s Reef” and decided they wanted to see my little rock. We ate lots of good food, drank good wine, and enjoyed renewing our friendships.

The same can be said of a visit shortly thereafter by Ken and Kate Brinkley of Portland. I first met Ken on an impromptu shared sailing afternoon out of Orcas Island’s Rosario resort in the 1980s. He became a lifelong friend. Ditto with Kate when she married him.

Ken, Kate and yours truly among Center Island madronas.

Not long after the Brinkleys departed in late September I left my island for a marathon day’s drive across the state to visit a new friend, R.J. (for Robert James). He lives in Moscow, Idaho, just across the state line from Washington State University, where he manages a library. I guess I’m partial to librarians. I met him online, which is a good way to make friends when you live on a small island nobody’s heard of. We’ve become chums.

Sandwiched in there somewhere was a visit with another friend discovered online, Tom, on Orcas Island. My boat, WeLike, got me there. It’s nice to find local buddies, too.

Doing the Idaho road trip in one day each direction was exhausting but also a treat. It had been a while since I’d seen so much of my home state, from the San Juans to Seattle, over the Cascades, to a bit of Coulee Country before navigating the rolling and roiling Palouse. I renewed acquaintance with phenomenal State Route 26, which slices straight as a razor across much of its 114 miles of Eastern Washington as it blazes a path toward Pullman.

Farmers had just completed the wheat harvest. The bright yellow-white stubble glowed in the sunshine as I crossed into Whitman County, where welcome signs boast that it grows more wheat than any other county in America. (In 2015, growers there harvested nearly 30.5 million bushels, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.)

Less than a week after my return to Center Island I again caught the Island Express water taxi. I was bound for the Seattle airport, where I hopped an Alaska 737 for Albuquerque, via a layover in Phoenix (where I was glad I didn’t need to step outside into the 108-degree October heat). New Mexico was more clement, with daytime highs in the 70s and low 80s.

My brother Doug met me and drove us the hour to Santa Fe and the lovely adobe home he shares with partner Lori, whom I enjoyed meeting for the first time.

My brother Doug Cantwell at our Great Sand Dunes National Park campsite in Colorado, about three hours from his Santa Fe home.

The next day I acclimated with a pleasant hike with Doug on the outskirts of his town at 1.3 miles of elevation (blowing a raspberry at your Mile-High City claim, Denver). A day later we aimed Doug’s shiny new Outback at southern Colorado for a three-night campout at stunning Great Sand Dunes National Park. I’d never heard of the place, which became a national park at the end of the Clinton administration, but I won’t soon forget it. North America’s highest dunes pile up against the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, dominated by 13,297-foot Mount Herard, of which we had a front-row view from our campsite that Doug had hand-picked from a prior stay.

Autumn colors are spectacular among Colorado’s aspens, willows and cottonwoods.

Piñon Flats Campground was named for the scrubby pines that this year were groaning with cones bearing the famed pine nuts that are so good on salads and in sauces. For two geezers whose combined ages approach 140, there was one advantage to having to rise from our cozy sleeping bags in what’s aptly called the “wee hours”: With a combination of dry air, little light pollution, and high elevation, Great Sand Dunes is certified as an International Dark Sky Park. “Wow” and “whoa” dominated our midnight vocabulary as we encountered Orion, the Pleiades, and a bright, night-piercing Jupiter, high in the eastern sky. Doug spotted more than one shooting star.

Though I puffed from the 8,800-foot elevation (I live just above sea level, remember), Doug and I made it to the top of a 700-foot+ dune, often slipping and sliding in the sand that dominant winds bring from afar. During my visit, warm sunshine brought out the startling gold of the area’s aspens and willows. An afternoon thunderstorm swirled towering black clouds around the mountain tops. And, after a half-day drive to the top of 10,856-foot Wolf Creek Pass on the Continental Divide, we experienced a wind-blown snow shower.

This past Saturday, before Doug and Lori dropped me at Albuquerque International Sunport (rivaling in airport-marketing silliness the “Sky Harbor” of Phoenix), we witnessed the final hour of a mass ascension, part of the final 2024 weekend of Albuquerque’s famed Balloon Fiesta. The colorful event draws some 600 hot-air balloons each year.

Frank Boy, a sort of young Frankenstein balloon, came from Brazil for Albuquerque’s 2024 Balloon Fiesta.

I’m back at the Nuthatch today, catching my breath. Over the next two weeks I plan to buckle down and write more get-out-the-vote letters for Vote Forward, which expects to contact 10 million voters before November 5. Ten days ago I mailed 140 letters to Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. Doug will be busy in coming days, too, having committed to 200 letters. There’s still time if you want to join us with your pen.

All the socializing and travel has been great, truly. But sometimes I love my quiet island. A good place to write.

Influencing the future from my little island in the San Juans

THIS CAME IN MY EMAIL and they asked me to post it. Not something I usually do in this venue, but it’s absolutely not a year to be neutral.

If you want to take action that might help get out the vote in crucial swing states, please join me in writing letters for Vote Forward, which aims to mobilize potential voters in communities that have historically been marginalized in the political process—such as people of color, women, and young voters.

Without naming a candidate or party, such letters encourage voters who likely support democracy and the U.S. Constitution to turn out in strategic states and districts. It’s a proven tool that can make a significant difference in close races. I like it because it’s something I can do from my kitchen table on my remote island far from the action. (We have daily mail pickup, even here.) At the Democratic convention last month, Michelle Obama urged us all to “Do something!” This is something I can do, whereas putting a sign in my yard doesn’t have much impact.

Your choice of political party doesn’t really matter this year, it’s a choice of candidates and their clear impact on our nation’s future. Just yesterday, more than 100 Republican former national security and foreign policy officials endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a joint letter, calling Donald Trump “unfit to serve” another term in the White House. Even former vice president Dick Cheney, neocon poster boy for the G.W. Bush administration, has endorsed Harris.

From a little island nobody’s heard of, that’s my nickel’s worth of politics. Autumn is election season! Don’t sit it out this year.

Rites of island autumn include loading the larder

Soft autumnal colors stretch to the Cascade foothills as the Padilla Bay Shore Trail winds along Little Indian Slough in the Skagit Valley.

I KIND OF LOVE MY ROUTINES on this little outpost surrounded by saltwater. Maybe it says something about me. I’m an island dweeb.

For example, the Big Monthly Shopping Trip to the Mainland is one of my highlights. And if I don’t follow a set routine I don’t get everything I like to have in my fridge and pantry.

So I keep a magnetized pad on my fridge and add to my shopping list every time I notice I’m low on something. If I don’t immediately add it to the list, chances are I’ll dork out at the grocery and forget about it. And next week I don’t get my nightly piña colada yogurt treat. No cinnamon to sprinkle on a ripe pear. No peanut butter in which to dip my lunchtime celery. (Horrors!)

That might all sound trivial to the landlubbers among you — those who don’t have to cross a saltwater strait to find a Fred Meyer or Costco. But it’s a serious concern when one lives on an island with no stores, where even a 7-Eleven would be luxury. (Access to a rotisserie hot dog, just down the block, rain or shine, any day of the year? You better know how lucky you are.)

Yesterday was my big monthly shopping day, and as my shopping days go, it was Extra Big. The larder was low. The pantry cupboards were no longer sagging under the weight of extra Paul Newman pasta sauce, flagons of avocado oil, or lashings of Chunk Light Tuna. Autumn is here, it’s time to stock up!

I grabbed the shopping list on my way out the door to catch the 9 a.m. Island Express water taxi to Anacortes. I would have until 5 p.m. before catching the last boat back. Plenty of time to shop, right?

As is my custom, I used the morning boat ride to divvy up the shopping among my three customary shopping venues: Costco, Freddy’s and Trader Joe’s.

With TJ’s in the plan, that meant a drive to Bellingham, Joe’s nearest locale. Even better, as shopping days went: extra adventure in one of my favorite towns. Brew pubs! Waterfront trails! Food trucks!

Also on the to-do list was a stop at a post office for more stamps for my Vote Forward letter-writing efforts, along with a haircut. (I really don’t do well cutting it myself I conceded after that time with the big bald patch on one side.)

I roughly calculated the time needed for all these stops, and realized I might be running for that 5 o’clock boat. So I prioritized. First stop: the cheap hair salon in Mount Vernon. The hair was getting seriously bush-like.

After a half hour of rapid snipping, oddly chopping and “how high is your part usually?” questions, the obviously inexperienced young woman behind the scissors set me loose considerably more light-headed, if slightly off-kilter up top.

On the chance that Bellingham was too ambitious, I decided to do the bulk of my shopping in nearby Burlington. First stop: Costco.

Though the prices and quality are good, Costco infuriates me with (A) the quantity you must purchase (Nuthatch Cabin doesn’t have storage for 30 rolls of T.P.!), and (B) the lack of basic supermarket organizational signage indicating which aisle holds canned corn and which is home to raisins.

So I had no choice but to race up and down every food aisle in search of the dozen items on my list. When driving one of those Costco carts that could double as a minivan for a family of four, speed is dangerous. I nearly took out several track-suited homemakers on a field trip from Sedro-Woolley and had a near miss with an octogenarian couple deep in debate over whether to get the regular prunes or pop for the organic.

But I had Bellingham on my mind. Dassn’t tarry.

After spending $191 at Costco, I lucked into a parking space within sight of Fred Meyer’s front door. I grabbed a large cart and tackled the longest part of my shopping list. I bought every carton of piña colada yogurt in their dairy case. Picked out enough shiny red apples to bake a crumble and slice for lunches for weeks. Piled the cart high. Filled seven bags at checkout. The tab: $174.

Back at the car, I laboriously packed my purchases into plastic totes and insulated cold-bags, then jumped in, steered toward Interstate 5, and put the pedal down for B-Town.

As I sped northward at 74 mph, my mind caught up with my accelerator foot. I let up on the gas a bit. Did I really need a Trader Joe’s stop? I might miss the extra bag of dry roasted but unsalted almonds. Or the frozen French green beans. But I had already bought almost $400 worth of groceries. Did I really need more?

I could probably make it to Bellingham and back, but I’d be racing. No time for a brew pub, or anywhere else. And I hate being late for my water taxi.

So I hit the signal and pulled into the exit for Bow Hill Road. I turned left and headed for the charming little Skagit Valley communities of Bow and Edison. A scenic route across the Samish Flats would lead me back toward Anacortes. At a leisurely pace.

Happy serendipity: One of the few structures composing the tiny burg of Bow was a tiny U.S. Post Office. I pulled in to the lot and interrupted the lone clerk who was vacuuming his itsy-bitsy lobby, seemingly surprised to get a visitor. I purchased a pane of fall-color stamps, which will help me encourage voters in Pennsylvania and North Carolina to go to the polls this election.

Along my pleasant drive across the valley, I stopped at a self-serve farmstand in Edison for a pint of fresh blueberries. I craned my head to try to count the number of fisher-folk wading in the Samish River, which must be having a big coho run. I stopped and hiked a mile on the Padilla Bay Shore Trail, from which I enjoyed expansive views of the Cascade foothills beneath multi-toned layers of soft September cloud. A lone heron was the only fisher here.

For me, this “Plan B” was so much better than racing about like a chicken with its head cut off, as my farm-raised mother used to say.

I paused at Seafarers Memorial Park in Anacortes for a few minutes of in-car shut-eye, then got my latest COVID vaccination and flu shot at the Safeway pharmacy, and made it to my boat with time to spare.

Home again, home again. Larder loaded. Sitting pretty, with autumn arriving.

A pilgrimage to Barbara’s enchanted isle

Toasting Barbara from her memorial bench, looking toward Boundary Pass in the Salish Sea and Saturna, left, and Patos islands.

WHAT ELSE CAN I SAY? Barbara sends her love.

That’s the first thought that comes to mind after returning yesterday from my second annual pilgrimage to Sucia Island to visit the park bench memorializing my late wife, who died of breast cancer in 2021. In 2022, state parks workers erected the bench, commanding what might be the most beautiful saltwater view in the San Juans, with the help of a GoFundMe project to which many of you generous readers contributed.

Daughter Lillian accompanied me this time for a cozy overnight in sleeping bags aboard WeLike, my restored 1957 Skagit Express Cruiser, a dazzling study in mid-20th-century turquoise, snugly tied to a dock in Fossil Bay.

My 1957 Skagit Express Cruiser, *WeLike.*

We arrived on Labor Day afternoon, just as many other boaters were heading home from their holiday weekend. After a bone-jarring ride through tidal turbulence encircling Orcas Island and hazardous wakes from giant motor yachts hell-bent for their home ports, we were thankful to find plentiful dock space at Sucia, our favorite marine state park, the blissful destination of countless voyages over past decades aboard our sweet old sailboat, Sogni d’Oro.

For the easy moorage this visit, we thanked Barbara, whose ashes we scattered on the waters here two years ago. She makes things happen here, we’re sure of it.

Your correspondent at Barbara’s bench, with Shallow Bay in the background.

We immediately packed snacks and a surreptitious bottle of Barbara’s favorite sauvignon blanc, setting out for the mile hike through deeply shaded woods of cedar and autumn-gold maples to her bench at the south peninsula forming soporific Shallow Bay.

The bench sits high on a bank above some of Sucia’s characteristic shoreline of wildly sculpted sandstone, like something Antoni Gaudi might have fashioned had he won the commission rather than the Northwest winds and tides. From a seat on the bench, a swivel of the head takes in a stunning panorama including Orcas, Waldron, Stuart and Patos islands of the San Juans, and Canada’s Saturna and Pender islands.

After a day of low-scudding clouds that sprinkled raindrops along our way, Barbara now cleared the sky to match the blue of her eyes that had bewitched me from age 16. If the weather had been perfect from the start and seas smooth, we’d never have found room at the dock, Lillian and I professed. “Mum watches out for us,” we agreed.

On the park bench memorializing her mother, daughter Lillian reads aloud from one of Barbara’s favorite mystery authors.

Though the birds had largely spared it as a target, we gave the bench its annual swabbing with cedar-sage spray cleaner, a scrub brush and paper towels. The bronze plaque remained clearly legible: “For Barbara, who loved this island, from Brian, who always sat beside her.”

Perched comfortably, my daughter and I munched on apple slices dipped in peanut butter, sipped a tart and fresh New Zealand wine from colorful metal tumblers off the boat, and took turns reading aloud from one of Barbara’s favorite mystery authors, Elizabeth Peters. “The Last Camel Died at Noon” featured the adventures of Egyptologist Amelia Peabody and her professorial husband, Radcliffe Emerson.

Lillian at the stone gateway to the madrona forest on Sucia Island.

After hiking back on an alternate route through a marvelous madrona forest, we returned in the morning with a vacuum jug of coffee and a small campstove. Cloudy skies cleared to golden sunshine just as we arrived at the magic bench. Over the stove’s flame, we made toast that we smeared with ripe avocado. More Amelia readings. More quiet communing with our beloved wife and mother.

“I miss her,” I told Lillian. “I do, too,” responded our daughter, who turns 33 this month. “She knew how to make things perfect.”

A spare paper towel had to suffice for the Kleenex I forgot to pack.

Much has changed in our lives and continues to change. My ability to fall in love has sputtered back to life, with emotional twists and turns. Lillian and partner Chris are soon to move to Philadelphia, as he takes a new job as a flight attendant. Lillian, the baker, hopes to become Lillian, the book editor. Along the way, they will enjoy free flights all over the world.

But come what may, our love for Barbara will never change. We think of her often. And at least once a year, at least one of us will return to commune with her on her enchanted island.

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.