Emulating the ant and rockin’ the grasshopper, at solstice time

My project for last week: refinishing the lightboards from my sailboat. Beyond the deck rail blooms the creamy flowers of oceanspray, a shrub native to Northwest woods.

SUMMER ARRIVES this week, the season when islanders like me try to blend the virtues of the ant and the grasshopper.

The Aesop’s Fable, you might recall, tells of the ants who spent their summer busily storing up food for the winter while their grasshopper neighbor spent all summer making music on his fiddle. By season’s end the grasshopper had good memories, and no doubt had polished up some catchy tunes, but faced a hungry winter ahead. When he asked for a handout, the ants told him to bugger off and go dance the winter away.

Therein lies the problem with old Aesop: His righteous protagonists can be mean-spirited bastards. But I digress.

Arriving at a happy medium in the ant-vs.-grasshopper industriousness quotient is my goal on Center Island. I also strive not to be as snotty as the ants.

Saturday, we had an island work party that hit just the right notes. I and 15 or so of my neighbors worked from 9 to noon on projects to preserve and prettify our community assets. I helped to scrape and repaint the railing on our upper dock, while some weed-whacked the boat yard and others did carpentry repairs on the clubhouse.

After three hours, we all gathered on the clubhouse deck for grilled brats and shared some island camaraderie and a pony keg of good IPA from Anacortes Brewery. Ants and grasshoppers. Too bad nobody brought a fiddle.

There’s lots to do around Nuthatch cabin this time of year. I continue to rebuild my deck a few planks at a time, with Lopez Island lumber-yard cedar ferried here on WeLike, 64-board-feet at a time. I try to restain one side of the cabin every summer. There’s lots of firewood to be split. And this summer I’m also doing projects related to my sailboat, Sogni d’Oro, in preparation for its sale.

Sogni d’Oro moored off Puget Sound’s Blake Island, July 2018.

Yes, an era is ending, as daughter Lillian and I have decided it’s time to find someone new to love the dear old Westsail 32, which has been ours since 1989. We have a prospective buyer, one of Lillian’s close friends in Seattle, someone who fits our hopes for a new steward who will give the boat care, energy, love and fresh adventures. I’ve promised a few restoration efforts first, and the sale depends on a satisfactory inspection, but hopes are high.

On Center Island, my summer routine has kicked in. I rise around 7 or 8, with coffee and a breakfast of avocado toast topped with walnuts. Once I’m dressed and more or less cleaned up (one doesn’t really need to shower unless you have visitors, right?) I often go for a bike ride (three brisk one-mile, through-the-woods laps of a route encircling our airfield), then devote a half-hour to a New York Times crossword before getting busy with some project for the day.

Foxgloves are June bloomers on Center Island.

This past week that involved stripping the spoiled old varnish and refinishing the sailboat’s teak lightboards — beautiful craft pieces my father built 30 years ago to hold the boat’s big, vintage zinc-alloy running lights. I cut the wires, detached the boards from the boat’s shrouds and brought them to my island for refinishing. Two days with a heat gun and a sander, then two coats of a heavy-duty waterproofing wood finish. I’ve ordered cutout birchwood lettering from a manufacturer in Idaho to match the Westsail’s sail emblem (a stylized capital W, with 32), which I’ll epoxy to the lightboards as my father did. He made the original cutouts by hand, bless him.

The refinishing project was a lot of work, but satisfying. And doing the work outside on my deck in the June sunshine, with wild foxgloves and oceanspray blooming nearby and twittering birds complementing the Jimmy Buffett tunes on my bluetooth speaker, wasn’t too painful. Galley Cat wandered by every few minutes to meow a hello and roll luxuriantly on the sun-warmed cedar deck.

The healthy 2023 kale crop in the Nuthatch’s rail-mounted planter.

That’s the antsy part of my day. The grasshopper kicks in around 5 when Galley and I indulge in what my daughter calls a “snooze read” (bedding down with a favorite book until one’s eyes close) up in the loft for a half-hour. Then it’s time for me to cook up a good dinner (tilapia tacos, say; maybe a stir-fry with fresh kale from my deck-rail planter) while cranking up more tunes and sipping a glass of good New Zealand sauvignon blanc from my monthly Costco run. The best offerings on Netflix often finish off the evening. (Even small islands nobody’s heard of get the internet these days. In fact, fiber-optic broadband is coming, we’re told. Yikes.)

That’s it. A day in the life of this antsy grasshopper on Center Island in the San Juans. Come 7:57 a.m. (PDT) Wednesday, happy summer solstice to my Northern hemisphere readers. Don’t forget your warm-weather chores. But remember to fiddle now and then, too. Maybe even dance.

The almost-finished product, awaiting new lettering to match the Westsail’s mainsail emblem. The red light goes on the boat’s port side, green on starboard.

Glory be, what a month it’s been

Betsy Davis’s classic double-ender motoryacht Glorybe, built in 1914 and rebuilt after a 2002 fire, looks highly decorative in a May sunset while riding a mooring just off Center Island.

OH MY, OH MY, my May.

Here it’s already Memorial Day weekend, one year since my crewmates and I shoved off for our 10-week voyage up the Inside Passage to Alaska, and I’ve had such a busy month of visiting with other friends that I need to catch up with you, loyal Reefers.

Getting too busy with friends can be a rare thing when you live on a small island nobody’s heard of. Lots of comings and goings this month. For me, that’s a good thing. Winters can get lonely when the winds howl.

Jean and Daniel Farber, May 2023 park hosts at Lime Kiln Point State Park, with an old lime kiln in the background.

Early in the month, I had a pleasant stay with friends (and Inside Passage crewmates) Bill Watson and Barbara Marrett on San Juan Island, paired with a bonus visit with old chums Daniel and Jean Farber. Usually at home in Olympia, they’ve spent the whole month of May living in a travel trailer on San Juan Island where they’ve served as interpretive park hosts (and ruthless wranglers of invasive blackberry vines) at Lime Kiln Point State Park.

Daniel, who retired from a distinguished career with Washington State Parks, once again proved his acumen as a parks pooh-bah by leading me on a walking tour rich in historical narration of Lime Kiln’s old quarries and upland trails. For example, little did I know that Lyman Cutler, the American farmer whose famous shooting of a British pig touched off the Pig War standoff here in 1859, was also a founder of the quarrying business at Lime Kiln Point, which shipped lime to be used in cement for building cities up and down the West Coast. Added trivia from my own research: After Cutler sold his interest, the mining company ultimately dissolved when one partner murdered another — proving, I guess, that it’s dangerous to be a mining baron, or a pig, on San Juan Island.

A curious red fox met us in the woods at Lime Kiln.

If you’re interested in island-living lore, my trips to San Juan Island aren’t quick or easy. I hire the Paraclete Water Taxi to take me from Center Island across Lopez Sound (3 miles, $38) to the Hunter Bay County Dock on Lopez Island, where I keep my faithful old Ford pickup, Ranger Rick (county parking permit, $25 annually for homeowners on neighboring Center and Decatur islands). I drive Ranger Rick 11 miles to park in the public lot (72 hours free) at the state ferry terminal, load my Rubbermaid tote (aka San Juan Samsonite) on my old red handtruck and walk it on to the next ferry bound for Friday Harbor (often waiting longer than expected because ferry runs get canceled due to crew shortages). The good news: the ferry ride is free for interisland walk-ons.

Ten days after my return from that adventure, Galley Cat and I were on the road to Walla Walla to visit my friend Patti Lennartson. Galley Cat usually vocally protests the idea of leaving the cabin overnight, and hides under a bed if she cottons to the fact that I’m packing again. But once she was in the car and set loose from her carrier to be a free-range travel cat (as free as she can be in a Honda Civic), she seemed fine with it. As usual, she often stretched from the passenger seat to put her front paws on the dashboard to watch the world go by. I think she likes high speeds. Crossing Snoqualmie Pass, she seemed fascinated by snowy peaks, as only makes sense for someone who has spent 99.9 percent of her 11 years at or near sea level. (She lived on a boat half her life.)

Latina dancers whirl and twirl at the College Place Block Party, near Walla Walla.

Walla Walla was sunny and hot. But Patti had the A.C. cranked up in the guest room, and Galley and I enjoyed a dose of extra Vitamin D when we got outside. Along with Patti’s daughter Stevie and her partner, Kevin, we drank some good Walla Walla wine, watched a Latin dance troupe at a street fair in College Place, ate good tacos and wood-fired pizza with fresh asparagus, and generally had a fine time.

Dancers balance beer trays on their heads in College Place. That’s talent.

Came back to lovely 65-degree days on my island, where the wildflowers are almost played out. The blue camas (with edible bulb) is almost done, though the appropriately named death camas (whose foliage and bulb are poisonous) is parading white stalks of flowers in a come-hither display. Happily, Galley ignores the siren call. She likes plain old grass.

Just when I was going to get down to work replacing planks on my deck, a delightful respite presented on Wednesday when dear friend Carol Hasse, another of my Inside Passage crewmates, texted to ask if she and shipmates on the beautiful, century-old wooden motoryacht Glorybe, moored that day at Jones Island, might put in at Center Island on Thursday.

Always say yes, friend Daniel and I have pledged, when serendipity knocks. So I got on the phone to island buddy Dan Lewis, who didn’t hesitate when I asked if his mooring buoy might be available. It was a perfect bluebird-sky May afternoon when Hasse, Glorybe skipper Betsy Davis, and fellow crewmate Ace Spragg came for a happy hour and fish-taco dinner on the Nuthatch Cabin’s deck (which will have new cedar planks soon enough).

From left, Betsy Davis, Ace Spragg and Carol Hasse depart my island.

Hasse, as anybody who has set foot on a sailboat in this hemisphere probably knows, recently retired from a renowned sailmaking business in Port Townsend. Betsy, former director of Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats, these days helms the NorthWest School of Wooden BoatBuilding in Port Hadlock when she isn’t at the wheel of Glorybe. Ace is that school’s education director after serving 11 years as sailing director, among other salty hats she wore, at Port Townsend’s Northwest Maritime Center. All this pedigree talk is simply to say that over beer, wine and a bit of good grub, we had a boatload of good nautical chat to share. I loved Ace’s stories about her idyllic childhood days of building and piloting rafts on the Chesapeake Bay (and constructing a five-story treehouse from which she and other kids dropped eggs — and anything else that seemed interesting — just to watch them splat).

The thing to remember is, friends don’t let friends work too hard. Tomorrow I get busy on the deck. Have a memorable Memorial Day.

The avian gold standard

NOT MY BEST-EVER Goldfinch photos, but worth sharing. These migratory songbirds are such a delight when they arrive in crowds, brightening the scene in early May. Another treat will come in June or so when new fledglings appear at the feeder: miniature, brightly feathered, not quite yet knowing where their feet are — a bit like human newborns. But could you fly at the age of 11 days?

**Peek-a-who?** That’s a Purple Finch, no slouch in its showy crimson feathers, peering around the corner of the Nuthatch Cabin’s well-used feeder. But a recently arrived American Goldfinch steals the show in its splendid lemony plumage.

Days of splendor arrive like an avalanche

Avalanche lilies on Center Island? That was my first guess. But, really?

THESE ARE MAGIC DAYS in the San Juan Islands.

As I sit in Wee Nooke, my cedar writing hut atop the rocky knoll, the door and windows are open wide. Buttercups at my doorstep match the sunshine streaming in. No heater today, for the first time since autumn. No hot tea to sip. I’m guzzling cool lemon-water and hyperventilating on the sweet scent of wildflowers. Our wintry days are finally done.

We’ve had a bumper crop of fairy slippers.

Besides those cheerful, buttery blooms, we’re enjoying a bumper crop of fairy slippers, aka calypso orchids. Sea blush, each of its flowers barely the size of a grain of beach sand, is starting to carpet the knoll with pink. And I was briefly flummoxed to come across what looked for all the world like avalanche lilies, those spidery blossoms of snow white on a tall stalk much more often seen on Mount Rainier than a few feet above sea level. Never encountered this flower on my island before, but this week half a dozen are bobbing in the gentle April breezes on the knoll. A little research proved that climate change hasn’t, in fact, brought interlopers off the mountain; these were great white fawn lilies, Erythronium oregonum, a common flower in the San Juans, though new to my corner. The leaves are spotted like a fawn, thus the name. (For a quick bit of education before making a wildflower safari to the islands, check out this useful guide, Wildflowers of San Juan Island National Historical Park, which pretty much applies to the entire archipelago.)

Pileated Woodpecker.
Courtesy Jack Bulmer/Pixabay

Birds are causing a flap in my world, too. The past few days I’ve been regularly hearing a distinctive call from what I believe to be a rare (for us) Pileated Woodpecker, that sartorially splendid redhead of the forest. These guys, which can be the size of a small chicken, often set the woods echoing with a burble akin to the jungle birds of old Tarzan movies. Nesting, maybe? But it might also be a Northern Flicker, whose call is similar and which is more common here. A big flicker clung and swung on my suet feeder this morning, perched as precariously as Kong atop the Empire State. Compare the two plus-size birds and their calls here and here on Cornell University’s handy “All About Birds” website.

Other avian excitement: Saw the season’s first American Goldfinch at my feeder 10 days ago, decked out in fabulous lemony plumage all fresh for mating season (there might even have been a paisley cravat there). Haven’t caught one on camera yet. But this morning, as I sat in my living room working a crossword, I looked up in time to see a large Bald Eagle swoop down through my trees, carving a wide circle directly in front of my window before perching on a tree limb by the side of the road. Wow!

I grabbed the camera, stepped outside, and called for Galley Cat. Give me credit here: I put the cat’s well-being above my hope for a photo. I’ve heard about eagles flying away with felines.

Lurking among the foliage, my eagle visitor hung around for 10 minutes, during which I kept Galley Cat inside.

Galley, for once, responded immediately from somewhere in back of the cabin. “Whadda ya want, Pops, whadda ya want?” she trilled, weaving in and out of my ankles while I click, click, clicked the camera shutter in the direction of our national bird, seemingly oblivious of the 10-pound ginger tabby who was doing her best to trip me. As soon as I got my photo, I shooed her inside.

That’s my report from the San Juan Islands on this exceedingly clement day in late April. I hope you’re relishing similar days. Wherever the seasonal wonders find you.

Earth Day gifts

IT’S A BIG YEAR for hummingbirds at the Nuthatch cabin’s feeder. I’ve needed to refill it almost daily. Working in my kitchen, I’m frequently alerted to their visits when my ear senses the thrumming of wings beating more than 50 times per second outside my window.

Others make a coffee klatsch of their visit.

As with many species, some are brighter than others.

Happy Earth Day

I REMEMBER APRIL 22, 1970. I was 14 years old, in Eighth Grade, and the first-ever Earth Day was a big deal to me.

I was attending a brand-new public school in Bellevue, Washington, that had opened its doors the previous fall. It was a modern new building, a school that celebrated modern ways to teach and learn. My teachers encouraged participation in this new concept of environmental responsibility. There was a feeling of optimism and hope.

My Earth flag flies from the cabin’s deck rail as a Nuthatch grabs a seed from the feeder.

I took it to heart by joining up with Bellevue’s first-ever organized — very loosely — recycling effort, led by a local high-school student. We crusaded under the ill-advised name of C.R.U.D., the Committee for the Recycling of Unwanted Disposables. Eastside Disposal placed free dumpsters in my school’s parking lot and promised to cart away and recycle the glass bottles we collected. My job was to sweep up any broken glass, and remove items such as the dead fish that some thoughtful citizen left for us. (The very smelly fish was, apparently, unwanted, and here was a place to dispose of it.) C.R.U.D. was a tiny start; a microcosm of a movement.

As I awakened this morning, I checked my email and read historian Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters From an American” post about Earth Day, and how “Silent Spring” author Rachel Carson planted the seed. The post also chronicles then-President Richard Nixon’s significant role in passing environmental legislation, including establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. I was shaken to be reminded that such landmark changes in our political landscape came under the aegis of a president that many of my generation so detested. Compared to present-day Republicans, the man was a saint (which is an excoriation of today’s GOP much more than an exoneration of Tricky Dick).

Today, I’ve hung out my Earth flag, and my to-do list includes organizing a bin of recycling to take to the mainland when I leave tomorrow for a visit to Seattle. Symbolic little things. Admittedly, recycling hasn’t saved the planet. Maybe it has helped focus our thinking. While I love my island retreat, on days like this I wish I lived where I could join a crowd of people intent on taking action for the greater good.

With the emergency klaxons sounding about climate change, it seems Earth Day 2023 is once again about hope. Reminding us all of prior progress, and embracing the possibility that new generations will commit to more effective and lasting measures — political and otherwise — means this day is still relevant.

Do you have any Earth Day memories? What does Earth Day 2023 mean to you?

Wildflowers and wider horizons as April whispers of change

Fairy slippers, aka calypso orchids, greeted me on a birthday walk around my island property Thursday.

I GOT FAIRY SLIPPERS FOR MY BIRTHDAY.

Don’t get me wrong, my wardrobe preference still tends toward duck boots, a wide-brimmed Pendleton hat and plaid flannel shirts lined with fleece. But yesterday, as Galley Cat and I commemorated my long-ago day of nativity, the Nuthatch estate honored me with my first springtime sighting of blooming fairy slippers, the tiny ornate wildflowers also known as calypso orchids.

These four-inch-high ornamental beauties of the sheltered forest floor (the genus Calypso takes its name from the Greek, signifying concealment) seem to like a certain patch of ground in the back corner of my little half-acre, where a side path leads up my rocky knoll. For the past few weeks I’ve been watching for them. It was a birthday treat to find a half dozen in bloom yesterday.

Visitors look over the Japanese Garden’s koi pond, where rain soon turned to snow last weekend. *Thomas Cantwell photo*

I had another busy week coming and going from Center Island. As a pre-birthday treat for myself, I took Galley on a long road trip to Portland/Vancouver, my old stomping grounds from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. I stayed in Vancouver with an old friend and colleague from The Columbian newsroom. While there, I also visited with my brother, Tom, in Northwest Portland, and friends Ken and Kate, who live in a houseboat on a back channel of the Columbia River.

Tom, my eldest sibling, had recently moved back to Oregon from a few years in southern Arizona. He hosted me for a breakfast of homemade pear scones at his cozy apartment, after which we ventured out on a very rainy Sunday to Portland’s beautiful Japanese Garden, one of America’s best.

While we worried at first about getting soaked, we found that a wet and misty day perfectly suited the garden’s peaceful atmosphere. And as we stood by a koi pool fed by a waterfall trickling down a rocky wall, pond-dimpling raindrops turned to enormous wet snowflakes. Suddenly we were meteorologically transported to Sapporo. It felt magical.

In the garden’s gallery, we marveled at the glass art of Japanese artisan Rui Sasaki, who gathered clippings of plants from this garden and from her native country and sandwiched them between glass plates before firing in a kiln, where the plants turned to ash, hauntingly etching their image in the glass.

Your correspondent with Rui Sasaki’s glass art. *Thomas Cantwell photo*

Later, looking out at rain pelting down on the Columbia, my houseboat friends and I rocked and roared to favorite old tunes like the Turtles’ “Happy Together” before feasting on Kate’s delectable roast chicken dinner. Back in Vancouver, my friend Deborah prepped her latest favorite New York Times recipes. I do OK in the Nuthatch kitchen on my own, but these were a few days when I ate particularly well.

Monday, my Vancouver friend and I took a walking tour of the newly developed Vancouver waterfront, a jaw-dropping transformation from the industrial riverbank I knew in the ’90s. Millions of dollars in investment has transformed a half-mile or so of shoreline that once housed tenants such as a Boise Cascade paper plant. New occupants include three fancy hotels, scores of glittering, high-end housing units, wine-tasting rooms from vineyards across the Northwest, and a variety of restaurants, including, to my surprise, a new iteration of The 13 Coins, a long-lived classic eatery that formerly occupied the Seattle Times building where I last worked. My friend and I ate lunch there.

A skater zooms along a public walkway fronting the newly redeveloped Columbia River waterfront in Vancouver, Washington.

While I didn’t see much in the way of affordable housing, the developers gratifyingly included an extensively landscaped waterfront public space, walkways, and an over-the-water viewing platform. Interpretive placards told the history of the area, and informative art installations were keyed to Northwest rivers and other relevant topics.

Remembering Vancouver’s past in a historical placard on the waterfront: Prune Queen Faye Vance honored a long-ago cash crop. *1919.*

Seeing this riverfront’s transformation was of particular interest to me. As a reporter for The Columbian in the early 1990s, I spent months on a reporting project aimed at seeding the cleanup and revival of the city’s neglected riverfront. It’s been a long time coming to this, but I could feel a scintilla of pride in the result. (A Columbian reporter recently wrote about my little role in the Columbia waterfront’s revival.)

It was a long road-trip for me and Galley Cat. We were glad to get home late Tuesday. Our little island is a quiet retreat from which we can contemplate our next foray, and contentedly watch spring arrive, wildflower by wildflower.

Glorying in a few days of spring

Sailboats sit at moorings on Fisherman’s Bay, just off Lopez Village, as seen from my lunch spot.

THE OFFICIAL, FARMER’S ALMANAC-SANCTIONED spring equinox might not be until 2:24 p.m. PDT Monday. But spring arrived today in the San Juan Islands.

Hallelujah.

The sky was clear, the seas were calm, the thermometer pushed 60 degrees, and Center Island’s docks were nearly full. All over my island people were outside hammering, hoeing, washing down and tidying up — doing all the celebratory puttering that comes with the end of a long winter.

I celebrated a few days early by relaunching my 1957 runabout, WeLike, on Thursday. It had sat forlornly on a trailer since November. Doing my part as a spring-inspired islander, I checked over the boat’s electrical system, added fresh fuel, drained the water strainer, ran the bilge pump and gave the boat a good scrub.

Then I buzzed over to Lopez Island yesterday for a blissful day of normal stuff you do when it’s not winter.

At Isabel’s Espresso, I sat outside on the deck and read a book while I sipped a good coffee. I stopped in at the supermarket for fresh produce. I took a sack lunch and strolled out to a favorite bench at Fisherman Bay Spit, where rogue daffodils were starting to bloom in the pasture of a long-deserted farmstead. I ducked into the public library and checked out a real book. What a delight! One gets overly reliant on Kindle when you live on a remote island.

Galley Cat, too, is reveling in the warmer days, gamboling up and down the rocky knoll. Returning inside today after an hour out inspecting the grounds, she smelled all sun-washed and fresh, like linen sheets that had dried on a clothesline.

It’s supposed to rain on Monday, the Weather Service says. But for a few days, we got a jump on the season of renewal, in all its glory. Hallelujah.

Practicing catch-and-release with my cabin’s chimney. (Sheesh)

A Dark-eyed Junco like this explored my chimney and woodstove this morning.

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL, Will S. wrote, and as I breathed a sigh of relief this morning I decided he was right.

But this is definitely the year I replace my chimney.

Being Daylight Savings Sunday, I was lolling in bed reading John Grisham and finishing my coffee and avocado toast at what some might call a late-ish hour of the morning. But I had that “spring ahead,” lose-an-hour-of-sleep excuse for lolling.

That’s when I heard the skittering.

For a moment I tried to convince myself it was a Nuthatch — the bird for which my cabin is named — outside messing about in my metal roof’s gutter, as they often do. Getting a sip of water, perhaps; the drainage isn’t all that great.

But then I heard it again: a sound like fingernails lightly brushing metal, and it wasn’t coming from outside. I recognized that sound.

Damn.

I had another bird down my chimney.

Loyal Reefers might recall a couple Novembers ago when this happened before. That time, I got paranoid about what was in my chimney, imagining anything from a hapless bird to a squirrel or raccoon (or, as several merciless readers suggested, a skunk).

At that time, try as I might I couldn’t figure out how to open up the chimney and release the creature, which had fallen into the lowest reaches of the woodstove’s metal flue, the eight feet or so that connect the stove with the cabin ceiling. The chimney has a conical cap up top and I expect it was screened when it was new, but the screen has probably disintegrated with rust and heat over the years. Rising high above my rooftop, it’s not easily inspected.

Unable to catch-and-release that first time round, I went with Undesirable Choice No. 2: Refrain from building a fire and let nature, uh, take its course. It was several days before the skittering stopped.

Eventually I discovered a way to remove the fire bricks at the top of the woodstove and was able to remove the poor dead sparrow.

As I lolled in the loft this morning, I resigned myself to another unpleasant days-long “death watch.”

But then I realized: Now I know how to open up the stove from inside. I could try to get the bird out. If I could free it from the chimney, maybe I could capture it in a large trash bag and set it free outside, hopeful that it wouldn’t be caked with soot and creosote. I had to try.

Meanwhile, Galley Cat, who usually snoozes the morning away on her heated cat bed downstairs, had come up to the loft to see me. Vocal and wide-eyed, she was clearly trying to tell me something.

Descending the stairs and crossing the living room, I saw what she was trying to communicate: “Pops!” (she calls me “Pops”)… “Pops, there’s a birdie in the woodstove, you can see it in there!”

Sure enough, this bird was no longer caught in the chimney, it had squeezed its way down past the firebricks and made it into the stove’s main chamber. There it was, clearly visible, fluttering behind the glass: a very unhappy Dark-eyed Junco. For goodness’ sake.

OK, Rescue One, suit up and respond to an avian distress call at 1366 Chinook Way.

Adrenaline flowing, I grabbed a trash bag from the pantry. Plopped the feline in the bathroom, behind a closed door. (She was certain she could help. I demurred.) I hoped to bag the victim as I cracked open the stove door, but in case it got past me I opened wide the glass slider and a side door.

Happily, the Junco wasn’t caked with creosote. It remained perfectly mobile, which it proved the moment the door was cracked. Despite my best efforts with the trash bag, I had a Junco flying around my living room.

Unfortunately, it didn’t find the open doors. It bumped against one of the big front windows, then flew through the kitchen and thumped against a window by the sink, where it decided to stay and flutter about.

Now, I have to say this for that bird. Whether or not it knew I was trying to help, it did me one huge favor. Anybody who has heard the sad tale of the duck that got into our sailboat’s V-berth, which ended with a very long afternoon at the laundromat getting our bedding de-ducked, will know these things can end badly. I’ll just say it bluntly: No matter how frightened it may have been, the Junco did not shit inside my house. Thank you. Were the roles reversed and a giant songbird was chasing me with a trash bag the size of Mount Constitution, I can’t promise I’d have been so reserved.

Anyway, I sidled over to the kitchen with my trash bag opened wide. The bird tried to take cover in a potted plant sitting behind the sink, but I swooped and scooped.

As first, I didn’t think I’d caught it. Songbirds don’t weigh much, and under the feathers there’s not a lot of bulk. I very lightly gripped the bag closed while I searched around the plant and among the dishbrushes. My home invader wasn’t there. So I carefully peeked into the plastic bag cradled in my fist and saw a pair of fragile bird feet sticking out. It wasn’t struggling, perhaps just resigned to its fate.

Keeping my grip loose, I quickly strode out onto the deck, put the bag down and opened it wide. The Junco flew away, and I don’t think it stopped until it hit Lopez Island.

All’s well that ends well. But, sheesh, it’s time to get a chimney with a screen.

Fleeing my rock for the City of Subdued Excitement

SOMETIMES A MAN JUST HAS TO GET OFF HIS ROCK.

When I flee the seemingly endless winter on Center Island and seek a place with more live humans, I guess you might call me an “off-my-rocker.” Kind of goes along with living in a cabin called the Nuthatch.

Anyway — forging prosaically on — when I need to get away and have just a day, I like to go to Bellingham.

This week I decided a necessary grocery-shopping trip would be a good opportunity for a northward pilgrimage to the City of Subdued Excitement, as Bellinghamsters like to call their town.

OK, I mean, right there — not only does the place have a great self-deprecatory, tongue-in-cheek slogan, but residents go by a name that conjures a vision of a town full of anthropomorphized rodents driving around in little cars. I appreciate a community with a sense of humor.

They also have almost as many craft breweries and brew pubs as Bend, Ore., which everyone knows adds significantly to the quality of life.

When my family returned from a 1990s sailing trip to Mexico after two years of being off the grid careerwise, Barbara and I realized we could start afresh wherever we chose. We hoped to make a go of it in Bellingham, a congenial college town on a beautiful bay, a half-day’s sail from the San Juans and practically in the shadow of Mount Baker and its razzle-dazzle ski area.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out. Newspapering was my life, and I did get hired and worked for one day at the local daily, the Bellingham Herald. But I was young, a bit cantankerous, and just returning from the freedom of the wild seas. That first day on the job, after I’d expressed enough disagreements with the corporate policies of the Herald’s parent company, Gannett, one of America’s worst newspaper chains, the newspaper’s H.R. director and I mutually agreed that it just wasn’t a match made in heaven. So my family sailed south into Puget Sound and I ended up at The Seattle Times. A happy ending, as it turned out.

From a viewpoint along Chuckanut Drive, the road to Bellingham offers panoramas of islands and saltwater in a varied palette of blues.

But I’ve always enjoyed visiting Bellingham, about which I wrote numerous travel stories for the Times. These days I like going even if only for a quick trip to the sole Trader Joe’s in Northwest Washington. From the water-taxi dock in Anacortes, it’s an easy hour’s drive.

I got a pleasant sunny day for this trip, and I found time to get off Interstate 5 and chug northward on scenic and serpentine Chuckanut Drive, the original northbound road that skirts the base of the Chuckanut Mountains, a foothill spur that geologists say is the only place the Cascade range meets the sea. It adds only about 15 minutes to the trip, but it’s a superb quarter hour. Starting from the Samish Flats, where I saw a fluttering flurry of snow geese, my red Civic snaked along boulder-strewn cliffs, passed chattering waterfalls and skirted moody panoramas of islands and saltwater.

An overwater boardwalk is part of the waterfront trail crossing Bellingham’s Boulevard Park.

Reaching town, I navigated the old-town Fairhaven district and pulled off at Boulevard Park. A narrow strip of land between the bay and the main north-south railroad tracks, the park offers shoreside benches, picnic tables, a kids’ playground and a waterfront path and overwater boardwalk that stretches miles into downtown. It’s my chosen stop when I pack a lunch. On breezy days, I’ve watched kiteboarders fly high out in the bay. The park even has a good, locally run coffee shop. Very civilized.

After lunch, my day was devoted to grocery shopping. But if you’re there with more time, Bellingham has a bunch of fine museums, dedicated to history, art, and even electricity (the eyepopping Spark Museum); a distinctively spired performing arts center (the 96-year-old Mount Baker Theatre); a variety of pleasant walking trails (such as a waterfront amble on Lake Whatcom), and the aforementioned breweries.

The excitement, though tastefully subdued, is earned.