The social whirlwinds of October

On the airfield: Neil Johannsen and Hilary Hilscher, of Bainbridge Island, visit a small island nobody’s heard of. Hilary holds an apple from one of Center Island’s old fruit trees.

I’VE RARELY HAD such a sociable October on my little rock in the San Juans. It’s been a happy whirlwind of visitors.

My buddy Tom from Orcas Island came over on the state ferry for a couple of days the first week of the month. A few days later longtime friend Patti, of another sailing family, visited from Walla Walla and stayed three nights. And I bid farewell yesterday to Hilary and Neil, birder friends from Bainbridge Island. Galley Cat and I feel like quite the social butterflies.

It’s been a good month for stocking up on visitors. Just as I’ve been busily cutting and splitting firewood in preparation for winter, I’m stockpiling social occasions that will by necessity dwindle as winter squalls set in for the long haul till March.

Your loyal correspondent on the beach at Fisherman Bay Spit, Lopez Island. Tom Willard photo.

The October weather has been a mixed bag, but every visitor got at least one dreamy day. Tom and I ate a sack lunch on the sunny beach at Fisherman Bay Spit on Lopez. I hiked with Patti through a canyon of salal to the rocky shoreline at Shark Reef County Park on a pristine autumn day. While Hilary and Neil experienced buffeting winds and horizontal rain, observed mostly from in front of my woodstove’s blazing fire, blue skies opened up the next day in time for an enjoyable walk circling Center Island. Our big-leaf maples are turning honey gold, an eye-candy complement to the darkly brooding evergreens.

October’s golden maples are a pleasing contrast to my island’s evergreens.

But the visitor season is drawing to a close. In anticipation of Sunday’s storm I hauled WeLike, my aqua-glorious 1957 cuddy-cabin cruiser, out of the water and tarped her on her trailer — probably until January tempests pass.

For the long, quiet months ahead, I’ve filed away some good memories: Teaching a new board game to Patti. (She won. Twice!) Watching a whimsical Jim Jarmusch film with Tom. (His favorite director, my newly acquired taste.) Smacking lips over my second helping of Hilary’s tasty enchilada casserole. (Gotta love visitors who bring dinner!) Witnessing confirmed feline-friend Neil’s jovial adoration of Galley Cat. (Even though she hissed at him in a moment of forgotten manners.)

Galley Cat on her pet heating pad. Few cats sleep so soundly. Neil Johannsen photo.

As with these memories, I’ve also stocked up on winter firewood. Our community association recently hired a woodcutter to take down dead or dying trees along our island roads. He cut 60 trees in one day. The supply of firewood has never been so profuse. Thanks to my handy new Husqvarna, my wood rack overflows with new rounds of Doug fir awaiting room in the woodshed.

Unfortunately, the tree cutting has also resulted in an Everest-like mound of trimmed branches awaiting burning at the end of our grass airfield. When the island caretakers torch that sucker it will likely be seen from outer space. Another unfortunate side-effect: Last week a San Juan Airlines single-prop plane delivering UPS packages to our island landed amidst a tailwind capable of lifting a Kansas farmhouse to Oz. Unable to stop at the field’s far end, the plane nosed into the brush pile, just enough to require a complete replacement of propeller and engine. (Anytime a plane’s prop hits something, the engine must be rebuilt or replaced for fear that delicate inner workings might have been thrown off-kilter.) For four days a repair crew brought replacement parts by air and sea. I lent a hand on our dock the day a boat arrived with one of the biggest, oddest-shaped cardboard boxes I’d ever seen. On it, large letters declared: “Contents: airplane propeller.”

So, rarely a dull moment on my remote little island of which few have heard. Not this October.

And the drizzle comes

Maple leaves are falling on my knoll. Along with raindrops. Not much autumn color happening.

IT WAS A DRY SUMMER on Center Island, other than the bizarre 48-hour thunderstorm with hourly downpours that we experienced a month or so ago.

But since yesterday, the first full day of autumn, we’ve aptly experienced the weather phenomenon for which the Pacific Northwet should be deservedly famous: drizzle.

In fact, I glanced at the weather forecast yesterday morning — rain for the next week — and dashed outside in robe and slippers, before my first cup of coffee even, to put away the deck furniture for the season. Not that Galley Cat and I ever leave things to the last minute at Nuthatch cabin.

Many non-webfooted outsiders think Seattle is the wettest city in the United States, with constant downpours, but with only about 37 inches of rain in the average year (drizzle, drizzle, drizzle), it’s not even in the top 10. The wettest American city of more than a million people? A place most people go when they want get a tan: Miami, Florida, averaging 64.7 inches of annual liquid sunshine. (Rounding out that top 10 list, based on NOAA records: New Orleans, Birmingham, Houston, Memphis, Orlando, Nashville, Atlanta, New York and Tampa.)

Center Island, in the Olympic rainshadow, gets only about 13 inches a year. Drizzle, drizzle, drizzle, drizzle, drizzle.

It’s cozy inside looking out. I might build a fire in the woodstove. Maybe make a cuppa tea. Happy Sunday, all. Batten down.

Winning the Mildred, and other highlights of the season

Halloween brought a respite from storms, as Mount Baker towered over Skagit Valley blueberry fields ablush with autumn color.

GETTING OFF OF THE ROCK means even more to me these days when it includes an actual social event, with real people who are all vaccinated and not wearing masks.

Well, there were a few masks at the social event of which I speak, but not the kind you’re thinking.

Halloween was a treat last Sunday, as it always should be, and moreso this year because it brought the almost-post-COVID return of the annual Burns Family Halloween Party, a highlight of the social year for me and my late wife’s family since, oh, probably the late 1970s. The pandemic caused its cancellation in 2020.

Mary and her monster. Note the clay heart in Lillian’s hand, and the jumper cables hanging from my pocket.

Since its inception, it has been a highly competitive costume party, with a trophy awarded. The legend is that my sister-in-law Kathleen went to Goodwill decades ago and acquired an old bowling trophy that had been awarded to a woman named Mildred. Kathleen replaced the bowling figure with a little waxen witch on a broomstick. Thus was born the Mildred Award for Best Costume, which has been passed around among champions of the sartorially macabre for lo these many years.

Barbara and I took the competition seriously, and over the years came up with thematic costumes that paired together. I was Ichabod Crane and she was the Headless Horseman. I was Edgar Allan Poe, she was the Raven. To mark the 50th anniversary of the first American ascent of Mount Everest, I was an ice-ax wielding Jim Whittaker and Barbara was a crazed-looking, prayer-flag-bedecked yeti. (Thanks to friend Suzy Burton, who has compiled this digital album of costumes from the party over the decades.)

It was tough this year without Barbara. But she was sweetly memorialized in the elaborately decorated Day of the Dead altar that my sister-in-law Margaret always creates as a comforting adjunct to the Halloween celebration. And daughter Lillian stepped up with a brilliant costume pairing idea: She went as “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley, circa 1818, and I was Shelley’s monstrous, galumphing literary creation.

In keeping with the spooky holiday, Mary Shelley fit right in. Not only did she create one of history’s iconic creatures of every kid’s bad dreams, she was certifiably odd in her own way. After her husband, the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned at a young age in a boating accident, she is said to have carried his preserved heart with her wherever she went. So Lillian molded an authentic-looking human ticker from modeling clay and carried it around at the party.

Like the Addams Family, we were creepy. We were kooky. We were altogether ooky. We won the Mildred.

Halloween weekend offered a welcome sunny and calm break from the gales and rainstorms that have beset us of late. It was but a respite, however. As I write this in Nuthatch cabin, the towering firs and maples outside my wall of windows sway alarmingly in high winds. The lowering sun, just emerging from rainclouds, flickers through the teetering trees like a blinding locomotive headlight of cold, pastel yellow. Cast in stark shadow, waving branches bearing autumn’s last leaves dance enchantingly across my cabin wall.

It’s November in the Northwest. I enjoy clement weather, but when I think on it, to live without seasons would be, well, monstrous.