A sailboat ghosted its way in light air toward Shaw Island as cyclists and hikers converged on Lopez Island’s Fisherman Bay Spit on this mild and sunny Halloween Saturday. In the distance: Orcas Island’s Turtleback Mountain.

THE WORLD IS SCARY ENOUGH LATELY, with the resurging pandemic, and Election Day less than 72 hours away, so Barbara and I didn’t mind a day of sunshine and serenity this Halloween.

We journeyed to Lopez Island for one of our favorite obligations: recycling and trash disposal. That might sound odd, but it’s an every-fortnight necessity that gets us off our little rock and into a pleasant world of people who wave when you drive by. (We wave on Center Island, too. But Lopez has a lot more folks to do the waving. It’s the Bright Lights.)

That done, we had a picnic lunch at our favorite bench overlooking the Fisherman Bay spit. Sweaters were in order, but the day was mild for the end of October. The pink Nootka roses I’ve enjoyed there in June were now ruby-colored rose hips on twigs brittled and browned by recent brisk nights.

Yesterday I carved a jack o’lantern and tonight we’ve lit a candle in it on the deck outside our window. A cheery fire crackles in the woodstove and Barbara is puttering in the kitchen, preparing colcannon, a traditional Irish dish for Halloween. In place of potatoes for me, she’s using mashed rutabaga in deference to my recently diagnosed diabetes. (I exercise, I eat a mostly vegan diet, I’m skinnier than I’ve been in years, and still it happened.) Upon our return from Lopez this afternoon, we stopped at the mail shack and found a Halloween gift package from daughter Lillian, with a homemade card and several packets of sugar-free candies. A thoughtful girl.

With dinner, we’ll enjoy our annual screening of “Arsenic and Old Lace.” Later, we’ll look outside for the full moon (a blue moon, in fact) while keeping a wary eye out for werewolves, of course.

Years ago, I drove a sporty red two-seater and we spent our time in the fast lane. These days I drive a 15-year-old pickup and a hand-decorated golf cart called Mr. Toad.  Life in the slow lane? I’m OK with that.

Happy Halloween. If you haven’t already, be sure to vote. (Not for the werewolf.)

BETWEEN WIND-TUNNEL GALES and rains enough to quench a mighty forest’s thirst, we had a lovely cool October day this week, and as I strolled in the lemony sunshine I met our resident farmer, Monique, with a basket of interesting gourds she was adding to her farmstand.

They were a sort of noncommittal, Creamsicle orange. They weren’t round like pumpkins. They were sort of stretched out like zucchini. They were pumcchini.

Yes, when you grow pumpkins and zucchini in the same garden, bees visit both and the occasional mixed-up offspring results. The gourds aren’t really good for eating, Monique said. And if you carved one as a Jack-o-lantern, it would quickly fall on its face.

But they’re decorative in a basket on your kitchen table, Monique said. She put $1 pricetags on each. That’s a bargain for produce that is Center Island Grown.

IT’S BEEN A BUSY late-summer building season at the Nuthatch.

Finally, our front steps are up to code, now seven normal-size steps where once there were four GIANT steps. (Anyone playing “Mother May I” would have had to ask special permission to get up to our front door.)

We are also now the proud owners of Center Island’s only art cart. We finally caved and acquired an electric golf cart, the preferred-by-many method for getting around on our island, where you aren’t allowed to drive privately owned internal-combustion-powered vehicles on the one-lane community roads.

The front steps replacement was a giant project for me. (Bob Vila’s job is safe.) I was helped along a bit by our generous island friend Dan Lewis, a union carpenter in his former life. But yours truly did much of the pounding, sawing, finishing and polishing. And everything is now legal, from the grippable handrails to the upright balusters that a four-inch ball can’t be pushed through (that’s in the state building code).

We’ve been among the sole holdouts who preferred to walk or bike around the island, but old legs keep getting older and it was time for a backup mode of transportation. So when an island neighbor was upgrading to shiny and new recently, we snapped up their old-but-still-functional (like us) E-Z-Go golf cart.

The first thing the cart needed was a cargo box for carrying groceries and supplies. I crafted one from cedar planks and repurposed bits of the old staircase, giving the cargo compartment a finned profile like the family station wagon of my childhood. But why stop there? Since seeing art cars displayed at Seattle’s Fremont Fair, daughter Lillian has always wanted to create one. So we offered her our golf cart as a blank canvas. Over Labor Day weekend, she gathered swordferns and leaves of salal, Oregon grape, and maple, daubed them with paint and printed the cart with nature’s images. Because the squat little vehicle’s basic color is dark green, and “Wind in the Willows” is one of our favorite read-aloud books, we’ve dubbed it Mr. Toad.

Other than that, the Nuthatch has endured deck repairs, railing repairs, gutter repairs and construction of attractive cedar screens around the not-so-attractive rain barrel and electric heat pump. It’s all part of this pioneering island life.

Winter will be a nice break. All I have to do then is chop firewood.

The nasturtiums have gone wild, tumbling down the ledge in front of the Nuthatch cabin this summer.

ON MY OWN at the cabin while Barbara’s gone for a few days, I step outside of a morning with my first toast and coffee to lounge, bathrobe-clad, in the old wooden Adirondack chair and listen to the birds. A wafting coolness hints of too-early autumn as cotton-puff clouds float aimlessly in the blue sky. I notice a hummingbird working the nasturtiums. I went overboard with them this year and they are cascading through the deck rail and down the cliff with trumpets of mandarin orange and sunflower yellow. I’m pleased with the effect. From the tall firs all around me, nuthatches serenade me with their own trumpets, though much more adenoidal.

Take a moment one of these mornings and enjoy your August.

Kevin, the Paraclete water taxi’s skipper, helps unload my lumber upon arrival at Center Island. The Paraclete is our primary link to Anacortes and the mainland.

CONNECTING WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD is not as easy for us islanders as for most people. In the midst of a pandemic that’s probably a good thing. But it also poses challenges when it comes time for, say, summer home repairs.

I made such a trip yesterday with a load of lumber and supplies to rebuild the front steps of The Nuthatch cabin. The cabin is more than 20 years old now, and in Center Island’s marine climate that means its time to rebuild outdoor structures such as wooden decks and stairways that are subject to water infiltration, mossy growth and rot.

Living on a remote island makes you an expert list maker, because if you get all the shopping done and something you needed wasn’t on the list, it’s not a quick trip down the street to make up for the lack.

I spent hours at Home Depot and Lowe’s in Burlington and Mount Vernon yesterday, picking out all the lumber, nuts, bolts and screws needed for my project.

Another challenge came in fitting everything in to our car. We have a pickup truck, but we keep it on Lopez Island. For mainland transportation, we rely on our Honda Civic sedan, which we keep parked at Skyline Marina in Anacortes.

You might be surprised how much lumber can be carried in a Civic. The trick: The rear seatback can be folded down, connecting the trunk space with the passenger compartment. I always feel like a Vegas magician when people watch me load 8-foot planks into the trunk of my small car. (Threaded between the front seats, they reach just short of the gearshift. I lash them in place so a quick stop doesn’t pop the gearshift into reverse.)

At Skyline, the Paraclete’s home base, I loaded the supplies into a dock cart.  As usual, the boat’s skipper and crew member volunteered to help wheel the supplies down a ramp to the salty 45-foot, 34-passenger motor vessel that has been serving the San Juans’ “outer islands” such as ours for many years. The 35-minute trip across Rosario Strait and into Lopez Sound costs $38 per person, including cargo in most cases.

Of course, no list maker is perfect. Today, as I tore apart our old front steps, I discovered rot in some timbers that I thought would be reusable. So, tomorrow my neighbor John (The Mad Birder) will kindly give me a ride to Hunter Bay public dock on Lopez Island, where Lopez-based Sunset Building Supply will deliver enough lumber to complete the project.

Connections come in many forms and from many directions when you live on a remote island.  Like Messrs. Lennon and McCartney, we get by with a little help from our friends. The view from the stern, looking eastward across Rosario Strait toward Burrows and Fidalgo islands, at right, with Bird Rocks at left.

 

 

They really do use horses at Lopez Island’s Horse Drawn Farm. We spotted this leggy colt on a recent visit to the farm stand.

IT’S HIGH SEASON at Horse Drawn Farm, our favorite purveyor of fresh produce on Lopez Island.

And when we visited the farm stand recently, there was also a new horse — a handsome, well-muscled young colt, apparently the next generation of the draft horses that farmers Ken Akopiantz and Kathryn Thomas use to plow their fields. (The farm’s name is for real.)

And there were goats, which we hadn’t seen before, including one sitting on a rock.

I got to know this farm in 2014 when I wrote a piece for the Seattle Times Sunday magazine about Akopiantz’s role in banning GMO crops in San Juan County. Happily, little has changed there — except for the new horse. And the rock-sitting goat. Here’s a look.

King of the mountain? Or the rock, anyway.

The very pretty produce cooler at the farm stand in July.

Barbara buys Swiss chard at the serve-yourself checkout counter. Sweet-pea bouquets add a heavenly aroma to the experience.

You might share your shopping experience with a chicken at the Horse Drawn Farm stand.

The farm stand occupies a weathered old barn, reached by a .3-mile long gravel driveway off Port Stanley Road. It’s open daily in summer.