One of America’s least architecturally distinguished state capitol buildings, above, is in one of the state capitals featured in the first Reefer’s Mini Quiz for Hopeless Geography Geeks. See Question 5, below. Artwork courtesy of Digital Horizons.

I REALLY DON’T MISS getting out of bed before dawn to go to work every morning.

But I do miss the good people I worked with at The Seattle Times, and I look back fondly at some of the projects and tasks I enjoyed. One feature I loved was the annual Seattle Times Geography Quiz, which we ran in the Travel section every New Year’s as a fun reader activity to wind up the holidays.

For much of the final decade I worked at the Times, it became my task to compose the quiz, and I loved it. I’m a total geography geek, and I believe readers appreciated a challenging yet fun quiz. I felt like the Will Shortz of geography.

So I’m bringing it here: the monthly Reefer’s Mini Quiz for Hopeless Geography Geeks. It will be just five questions each month on whatever topic I choose.

First topic: U.S. STATE CAPITALS. No Googling (this means you). Answers are upside down below.

1. What state’s capital, when spelled out, includes three pairs of doubled letters?

2. What state’s capital, when spelled out, ends with the name of a popular roll candy?

3. What are the most populous and least populous state capital cities in the U.S.?

4. What state’s capital is also the name of the prickly aunt in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”?

5. What state has the only capital city named for the leader of another nation?

ANSWERS (Turn your laptop upside down, but don’t drop it, OK?)

Thanks for playing! The quiz will be back in February.

Seen from Center Island, boats shelter in Decatur Island’s Honeymoon Cove, looking across a tombolo to the whitecaps of windblown Rosario Strait.

WINTER IS NOT DULL on our island.

There are fewer people, for sure. Neighbors occupy only a handful of the vacation homes this time of year. If social whirl is what you’re looking for, you got off on the wrong rock.

For those of us who live here year-round, this is the season that makes us feel a bit like pioneers on the edge of the world.

The whirl we do experience is wind. Maybe it’s how climate change is manifesting in the San Juans. For days on end in January, we get windstorms.

The National Weather Service has a cool trick where you can call up a map online, touch the screen for your location and get a pinpointed forecast. For Center Island, our typical forecast almost daily for the past two weeks has been along the lines of “Showers turning to rain, southeast wind 20 to 25 mph, with gusts to 40.”

So we’re hunkered down. Our little boat, WeLike, which doesn’t enjoy going out in such winds, is securely tied to our community dock. We haven’t pulled her from the water because, well, it’s usually too stormy to do even that. We walk across the island to check her every day or two, to run the bilge pumps and snug up the lines and fenders. So far, so good.

But we’ve also not left the island since before Christmas.

Happily, it’s a season when we have new books to read and games to play (thanks, Santa), and Barbara keeps a well-stocked pantry year-round, so nobody’s going hungry. But the fruit bowl is low, the fresh vegetables are pretty much gone, and we’re hoping the Amazon order of cat food isn’t delayed too much longer. (It’s coming by a UPS plane, but they don’t fly in high winds.)

So we sit in our living room with its high wall of windows, watch the 100-foot firs sway like sea grass in a typhoon, and listen to falling limbs ka-thunk as if they’re coconuts on our metal roof. (We can imagine we’re in Hawaii.)

Only once in our 16 years of cabin stewardship has a tree come down on the place, necessitating a replacement roof on one side. The structure is strong enough that the big fir didn’t pierce the interior ceiling. We’re hoping that was “our one time.”

This video is from one of the milder days of wind recently, as seen from Madrona Bluff.

On the worst night of winds last week, a dead tree fell across our road. The next day a lull in the rain allowed me to get out the new gas-powered Husqvarna, shared with neighbor John. Gunnar, as we’ve dubbed the Swedish-heritage chainsaw, made quick work of the 10-inch-diameter fir. The good news: It was dead, dry and perfect for burn-it-now firewood. And splitting it gave me a good chance to “get my corpuscles ’puscling,” as Barbara likes to quip. Restocked the woodshed nicely.

We also like to pull on our rubber boots and walk around our island between rainstorms. Pecking for mites in the gravel road ahead of us, the latest feathered arrivals blown in on the storms are golden-crowned kinglets, tiny cheeping balls of green and gray with a dramatic orange stripe atop their heads, like avian punk rockers. At our favorite viewpoint, which I think of as Madrona Bluff, for the artfully gnarled, bronze-barked trees hanging over the high bank’s edge, we watch white-capped swells steamroll across Lopez Sound.

Maybe the winds will drop enough tomorrow to let us fire up WeLike and get across to Lopez to replenish our toilet-paper supply, among other items running low. We’ll see. Never a dull moment in a Center Island winter.

Next week’s forecast says snow.

The Nuthatch cabin is our island refuge where I get to gather greenery to make our own holiday wreaths.

IT’S A BLUSTERY DAY IN SHADYHANGER, to paraphrase one of my daughter’s favorite childhood picture books, “The Adventures of Dudley Dormouse.” (His home wood, Shadyhanger, always seemed like a good place to be from.)

Our tall firs are dancing the hula and rain has been drumming a tattoo on our metal roof since daybreak. It’s now 3 p.m. on New Year’s Eve and it’s already getting dark on Center Island, which I think we should consider renaming “Shadyhanger Island.”

Barbara and I are sitting by the fire and sipping a glass of wine as I turn on my laptop to reflect on the change of year. At times like this, there’s a kind of bliss to being so far removed from the rest of the world.

We are thankful to be fortunate. We just hosted our delightful daughter for the holidays. We have health challenges, but not today. We live in a place where I get to craft my own giant Christmas wreath of bent cedar, fir boughs, salal and wild holly. We have good friends and loving family, near and far.

Resolutions are something people talk about. Neither Barbara nor I take such things very seriously, but we do set goals for the coming year. She has applied for a writing fellowship in Alaska. I’m determined to work on a mystery novel or two. I’m hoping to get closer to the natural world. Do more birding and trail building. Get to know some Lopez Islanders. Make more beer.

Barbara asks if I mind being so isolated on our island. The answer is “mostly, not.” But I do treasure old friendships, and keeping them going can be a challenge when people are in Seattle, Olympia or Portland, caught up with the daily tasks of life and the pleasures and headaches of the city while I’m here tootling around on my boat and taking photos of birds. So, please, come and visit.

A pair of hooded mergansers — a male in foreground, and female beyond — bobs in winter waves on Reads Bay, off Center Island.

One challenge for me in 2020 will be to feel involved in important decisions for our nation. In 2004, I felt compelled to go to Florida, Land of the Hanging Chad, to help Miami’s inner-city voters get to the polls on Election Day. This year’s election is far more crucial to our future.

Tonight we’ll all raise glasses to mark the arrival of a new year — but not a new decade; that will be 2021, my sweet librarian wife insists. (She also was a stickler for claiming the 21st century started in 2001.) Here’s hoping that in months to come, science, education and compassion will triumph over ignorance, lies and intolerance. That we’ll once again find leadership that honors and cherishes America’s constitution rather than showing it brazen contempt. That our democracy will survive the buffeting winds of demagogy.

It could be a blustery year. My personal wish for friends and family, including you, dear reader, is for health and happiness, love and delight.

New year, new beer: Life can’t be too bad when you get to concoct your own brewskis. Here are the newest ales from Nuthatch Brewing.

Your correspondent models a homemade bird mask inspired by the pagan-tradition solstice celebrations of Penzance, England.

SATURDAY’S WINTER SOLSTICE REMINDED ME: I just love living next door to Lopez Island.

We had a little solstice observance at The Nuthatch on Saturday evening. Neighbors John and Carol came over. We dug out the solstice masks we made a few years ago after daughter Lillian had returned from a winter in England, where she attended Montol, the solstice festival in Penzance, where Cornwall pokes into the Atlantic like a finger into an eye. (Geography nerd’s digression: It’s next door to my favorite-named English town, Mousehole, which Lil tells us the locals pronounce as “Mouzel.”)

Penzance, where Gilbert and Sullivan based their “Pirates of Penzance” operetta, has revived the pagan tradition of celebrating the shift of seasons and the beginning of longer days with masked revelers parading the streets, led by someone called the Lord of Misrule. There are massive bonfires, street dancing and merriment throughout the town every December 21st.

Our Center Island celebration was staid by comparison. John and I, the charter members of the Center Island Writer’s Guild, both have a fondness for John Steinbeck, and last night we sipped hot cider laced with applejack (Steinbeck’s favorite quaff) and read aloud from the works of one of our favorite poets, Robert Frost, whose writing often reflected an appreciation of the grand solemnity of winter. (“My little horse must think it queer, to stop without a farmhouse near, between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year…”)

We burned a traditional yule log, marked with the date and drawn with a stick figure representing Father Time, to signify the passing of the year. We ate Barbara’s lovely, rich pot du creme au chocolat and Carol’s perfectly piquant cranberry bread.

As the hour and minute of the official change of seasons approached, we carried a lit candle out into the dark to look up at the stars. And at precisely 8:19 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, when the sun’s path across the sky officially began to track back northward for the return of longer days, someone on Lopez Island, less than a mile across the water from us, set off fireworks. The quiet night erupted with booms and bangs, as if it was midnight on New Year’s Eve.

I’ve never experienced fireworks anywhere else on the winter solstice. But this is an island whose most common event on the weekly community calendar is yoga sessions, along with tai chi, zumba and something called “Ecstatic Dance.”

It’s lovable, lefty Lopez, and it made me smile. Happy solstice.

From left: Your scribe, his lovely bride, and friends Daniel and Jean, on the rooftop at Seattle’s Inn at the Market on a special Sunday. In the background is the Great Wheel, edging Elliott Bay.

WHEN YOU SPEND WINTER on a really quiet little island, special occasions tend to be really special.

Such was the case this past weekend, when Barbara and I sampled Seattle’s high life in celebration of our 40th wedding anniversary.

Forty years sounds like a lot, but it’s not a true measure of how long we’ve been together. That would be 47 years this coming New Year’s Eve, the anniversary of our first kiss, a big smooch in the back seat of her boyfriend’s car, while her then-boyfriend (not me) was in the driver’s seat — but, oh, hey, we don’t need to go into all that. (It was complicated.)

We were high-school sweethearts. I was 16 and she was the alluring older woman of 17, not long out of Melbourne, and with a tantalizing Australian accent.

We dated for seven years before finally making it legal on December 15, 1979.

Sunday, we booked a stay in a posh water-view suite at our favorite hotel in the world, Seattle’s Inn at the Market, in the Pike Place Market. Daughter Lillian and I spent the forenoon doing our annual Christmas shopping spree, dividing our time between the Ballard Farmers Market and Pike Place. At 2:30, we met up with Barbara, who had already checked into our suite. We found her reclining on a chaise longue next to a wide window with an astounding view of the market, the Seattle waterfront and Puget Sound. Shoppers scurried about below. Ferries scuttled on Elliott Bay. Gulls soared at eye level. She seemed pretty happy.

Friends Daniel and Jean Farber drove up from Olympia and joined us in our suite for a cocktail hour — a shared bottle of good bubbly from Walla Walla and snacks from DeLaurenti’s deli. Daniel, my former college roommate, was best man at our wedding. We all dressed up a bit for this occasion. I wore my old wedding tie, which was only a tiny bit frayed (not unlike its wearer). Barbara found her actual wedding lipstick. It was still a dark and luscious burgundy.

Our evening was a dinner show, the holiday extravaganza at Can Can cabaret, an underground theater next door. (From the bar you can look straight up through little translucent tiles and see people’s feet walking the sidewalk three feet above you.) The show had a lot of winter-wonderland-y music, flashy dancing, crazy acrobatics, a lot of titillating humor and, uh, not a lot of costumes in some scenes. (There were fans, and feathers, and sequins.)  We all agreed that, while kick-dancing a fine line at times, it was whimsical, not crass. And we had fun, fun, fun.

It was a delightful way to celebrate that we, too, are still alive and kicking. And sometimes getting away from our island hermitage for an indulgent weekend in the city is just what the lifestyle doctor ordered.

Brian, Lillian, Barbara and Jean warm up by the rooftop bonfire at the Inn at the Market. As Barbara and Jean demonstrate here, by the end of the evening, after a couple bottles of bubbly, we were all a little blurry — in the best sense.

 

A Northern flicker grabs a December snack from a suet cage hanging from the eaves of Nuthatch cabin.  Of the woodpecker family, mostly we get downy woodpeckers and hairy woodpeckers, but occasionally one of these flashy dressers drops by. This is a female, distinguished by lack of a red stripe across the cheek, as seen on males of this red-shafted (Western) species.

Bucolic beauty of late autumn: I grabbed this shot of Mount Baker last time I drove across the Skagit Valley on my way home to the San Juans.

HEADING INTO THE HOLIDAYS, somehow we feel busy even in our island hermitage, where the only other life forms we see some days this time of year are fat spotted towhees on our deck railing and hairy woodpeckers hanging on the suet cage. (Who knew they made a squeak like a cat toy while eating?) We’re busy making lots of plans to get together with friends and family.

We already have our Christmas tree, with plans to put it up on Saturday when Barbara is back from a round of doctor visits in Seattle.

Though our Christmas is more a celebration of solstice and a good excuse to brighten winter’s cold, short days, we go whole hog with Christmas traditions. It’s how we were brought up. And we do a pretty spectacular tree, festooned with ornaments collected over decades, inherited from parents and grandparents, souvenirs of travels, knitted and sewed, or picked up from the forest floor (including a new bunch of nice Ponderosa pine cones I fetched home from a trip to Winthrop in September).

In recent years, we got our tree from places like Home Depot, which wasn’t very satisfying. We tried to find a good u-cut tree farm, but many seem to sell out the weekend after Thanksgiving, which has always felt a little early for us.

This year, serendipity stepped in. When Barbara and I took our boat to Lopez Island last weekend for a little shopping and a trip to the dump, we found a tree lot set up by the Lopez 4-H Club. The trees were, ahem, island priced. But we decided it was a lot easier to stuff a tree into WeLike and get it home in a half hour than to wrap it and tie it on to the car for a freeway trip home from our next visit to Seattle.

And it was much more satisfying to give our money to the 4-H kids on the next island than to the big store headquartered in Atlanta. We came home with a pretty Nordmann fir. I gave it a fresh cut with the chainsaw and it’s sitting out back in a bucket of water, smelling spicy and good, waiting to be the centerpiece of our December celebrations.

Our traditions keep evolving the longer we live on our rock. I think we’re becoming islanders. And our cats are more and more intrigued by the woodpeckers.

With the aid of a telephoto lens, Mount Rainier dwarfs the Tacoma skyline and ships on Commencement Bay, as seen from Dune Peninsula, a newly opened annex of Point Defiance Park.

DATELINE: TACOMA.

I’ve been fortunate to hook up with Journey, the magazine published by AAA of Washington, for which I’m working on three freelance travel-writing assignments.

One is a little piece for their website, part of a series of day-trip getaways. This one focuses on Tacoma.

So on Wednesday I visited Tacoma for a fresh look. And this town, which many Seattleites a few decades ago sneered at as the armpit of Puget Sound, continues to surprise me. Among other things, I found a newly minted section of its famous Point Defiance Park dubbed Dune Peninsula, which opened in June. It’s a gorgeous park of waterfront paths, sweeping lawns and dramatic earthscapes created on a former Superfund site where the now-defunct ASARCO copper smelter once dumped its slag. The name “Dune” comes from the futuristic novel by Tacoma native Frank Herbert, whose tale set on a harsh and inhospitable desert planet is said to have been influenced by his life experience in Tacoma in the 1950s, when it was one of the nation’s most polluted cities.

Among Dune Peninsula’s attractions, on a clear day such as I experienced on Wednesday, is perhaps the best panoramic view of Mount Rainier that you’ll get anywhere (as seen above). That this showcase piece of parkland grew from a toxic waste dump is an inspiring tale of rejuvenation.

When AAA publishes the piece online in a couple months, I’ll post a link so you can read all about it.

“Sipping this spiced amber ale is like drinking a slice of pie,” according to Northern Brewer, the outfit from which I order my beer ingredients. Spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger, it’s flavored to fit right into the autumn menu. Barbara and I shared the first bottle this afternoon. And who says pumpkin pie doesn’t go with a bowl of corn chips and roasted almonds?

A pair of trumpeter swans swims in a Lopez Island marsh off Fisherman Bay Road. They winter here after spending summer breeding months in Canada or Alaska.

HONK! HONK! The Lopez trumpeters have arrived.

We’ve always enjoyed the migrant populations of trumpeter swans in the Skagit Valley every winter.  These birds, stretching up to 6 feet in length, are North America’s largest native waterfowl.

It’s a stirring sight when two or more fly overhead with their long, snowy necks outstretched and giant wings spread wide, often filling the cold autumn air with a honk that, to be honest, sounds more like a Model T Ford than a brass trumpet. Gives you shivers, nonetheless.

In our first autumn in the San Juans, a year ago, we were pleased to discover that Lopez Island is another stop for wintering trumpeters. A small population inhabits a wide mid-island wetland just off Fisherman Bay Road, a couple miles south of Lopez Village.

A few weeks ago we saw the first arrivals, coming from summer breeding grounds in coastal Alaska and Canada. This week we returned with my camera, and counted about a dozen of the big birds.

Once hunted to near-extinction because their plumes were valued for quill pens and women’s hats in the 18th and 19th centuries, trumpeters are now considered a “recovering” species.

Whenever we visit Lopez in the colder months, we make sure to drive Fisherman Bay Road and listen for the Model Ts in the sky. That’s “T” for trumpeter.

Trumpeter trivia:

• Trumpeters take an unusual approach to keeping their eggs warm, covering them with their webbed feet. That makes sense since sitting on them might be hazardous, as adult trumpeters can weigh more than 25 pounds.
• The trumpeter’s scientific name, Cygnus buccinator, is from the Latin Cygnus (swan) and buccinare (to trumpet). Humans have a buccinator muscle in our cheeks — used to blow out candles and to blow into trumpets and other musical instruments.

— thanks to The Cornell Lab’s website, allaboutbirds.org