A wild currant blossom presages the arrival of spring on Center Island.
DO YOU FIND JOY TOUGHER TO GRASP THESE DAYS? If so, you’re not alone, and that’s important to acknowledge.
On a rainy day walk through the lush Gazzam Lake Nature Preserve on her home turf of Bainbridge Island last week, my friend Hilary commiserated when I told her I was finding it tougher to write regular posts on “Cantwell’s Reef.”
“I like to write about the joys I’ve found living on my island,” I told her as I squished along a muddy trail flanked by arsenals of sword ferns and tall maples thickly upholstered in chartreuse moss. But with the people in charge taking a wrecking ball to the world all around us, joy can be thin on the ground. Just today my brother sent me an apt meme that declared, “This entire presidency is like being tied to a chair and watching a toddler play with a loaded pistol.”
Emily Freidenrich, our new partner at Seattle’s Lake Union Publishing, and my author friend, Neil Johannsen, by sculptor Thomas Dambo’s “Pia the Peacekeeper” troll in a Bainbridge Island park.
Maybe I should share that feeling with all you Reef readers, who are living through the same experience, Hilary suggested. I mulled that and quickly saw the wisdom. Perhaps there’s a “misery loves company” element to it, but it’s more: Friends and loved ones need to support one another through these times of upheaval and uncertainty. Minnesotans bravely modeled how to resist hate and brutality, but there’s a flip side to resisting. We also need to grab joy and celebrate it when we find it.
My joy last week was lunching with Hilary and her husband, Neil, at a cozy Bainbridge pub with Emily, an acquisitions editor at Seattle’s Lake Union Publishing. I had just helped Neil land a book contract for a historical novel on which he had labored for 50 years. This was my first (and likely only) experience as a literary agent. It’s been an interesting bag of new tricks for this old dog to learn. Challenging but, well, joyful in the end.
The joy back home on my little island comes in observing the signs of spring’s pending arrival, such as the watermelon-pink blooms of wild currant outside my cabin’s front door. Or in planting a new quaking aspen tree next to Wee Nooke, my writing hut named after a cottage that Edwin the Boy Scout burned to the ground in a P.G. Wodehouse novel (after he tried to clean the chimney with gunpowder). That book’s, title, coincidentally: “Joy in the Morning.”
Autumn aspens in Colorado
This might be the first such aspen (Populus tremuloides) on Center Island, but there are many bordering Shallow Bay on Sucia Island, 18 miles north of here, so it’s almost a native species. I figure the climate difference isn’t much. I’m hoping my new tree will offer both the splendid music of wind-ruffled leaves as well as the joyful autumn glow for which its species is famous.
I’ve said it before and the news headlines just keep hammering home the importance: Take joy where you find it. Share it with everyone around you.
I never expected to be quoting Bad Bunny, but it’s pretty darn true: The only thing more powerful than hate is love. Add joy to that and you’ve really got something.
The tree guys at work: John, left, and Austin trim dead wood from a bigleaf maple behind Nuthatch Cabin.
BIG TREES SURROUND MY CABIN, and mostly that’s a delightful blessing.
The best time is a blue-sky summer morning when I can sit on my deck with a mug of steaming coffee, look straight up and watch golden rays sneak into the treetops 100 feet above my head as the sun just crests the rocky knoll behind me.
The trees are a little more worrisome but no less entertaining to watch through my front windows on a blustery winter day as they shake and sway like wild Tahitian dancers.
Two tall fir snags turned to shards and wood dust when they fell, just missing my woodshed. The remains will nourish the forest duff.
Rarely does one fall, but it has happened. About 15 years ago, when we still came to Center Island only for monthly getaways from Seattle, a big fir broke off about 15 feet above the ground and fell directly on my cabin, punching a hole in the metal roof. Happily it didn’t break through the wooden ceiling. A roofing crew from Skagit County came out on a barge and replaced half of the roof at a cost of $11,000. Thank you, Farmers Insurance.
But the base of that tree remained as a tall snag, only a few feet from another old dead fir snag about three feet in diameter and 20 feet high with spears of sharp wood topping it. Both were a fall-down hazard that could have taken out my cedar woodshed or my neighbor’s shed, not to mention one of us if we were in the wrong place at the right time.
After years of saying “I need to deal with those snags,” on Tuesday I commissioned two tree cutters to come over from Anacortes and take them down, along with the dead upper limbs of a nearby bigleaf maple.
The tree guys, John and Austin, were experts. John called his partner Austin “a sniper” because of his ability to lay a tree down exactly where he wanted it to fall. Using one of the bigger chainsaws I’ve ever seen, he fell both big snags without damaging either woodshed or even another tree.
Austin straddles a maple as he cuts pieces of it from above him. His chainsaw dangles on a cord until needed.
The snags were so rotten inside that both disintegrated into powder and wood shards when they hit the ground. An earlier inspection by another tree man had produced the recommendation: “Don’t breathe on them” for fear they’d fall. No firewood out of this cut! The fallen remains will nourish the forest duff.
What was most fascinating was to watch Austin go to work on the maple, whose dead upper limbs reached above my rooftop. This tree, on a steep slope, presented two challenges: I wanted to save the lower 7 feet, which still had living branches that spread many shading maple leaves in summertime. And there was no clean and safe fall line to drop the tree in place without hitting my back deck, my compost bin, my water tank or the beautiful mossy rocks atop the knoll.
One of the rotten stumps remaining.
Austin’s first surprising move was to climb high into a nearby fir, probably 80 feet off the ground. Using lumberjack spikes mounted to his boots, he zipped upward like a squirrel. Once high enough, with a small chainsaw dangling by a cord from his waist, he rigged a safety line, lowered himself back down and managed to lean out far enough to start cutting the topmost limbs from the maple. Eventually he executed a short Tarzan swing of sorts and positioned himself on the maple’s trunk. He then proceeded to cut pieces of the tree above him, lowered them on a rope to his partner, and methodically made his way downward. Now I know the origin of the term “tree surgeon.” His work was meticulous.
They were done in fewer than 90 minutes. I paid the $1,200 fee they had quoted. For their expertise and dangerous work, they earned it. Nobody got hurt, and Center Island’s woodsheds are out of danger. Another challenge to living in woods on a remote island has been met!
A Golden-Crowned Kinglet pecks for mites among the mud and gravel of a Center Island road.
THE ONLY OTHER LIVING BEINGS I saw today were Galley Cat and four Golden-Crowned Kinglets. Oh, and two squirming earthworms driven by heavy rains to the surface of my dirt road, much to the delight of the resident feline who found them almost as fun to play with as garter snakes.
Those were the only signs of sentient life on my corner of Center Island this January day. After a busy and well-visited holiday season, I was kind of OK with that.
Kinglets, regular winter visitors here, are tiny birds barely bigger than my thumb. Their nearly inaudible call, like the tinkling of a wind chime made of icicles, is an entrancing winter soundtrack when all else on my island is still and quiet.
A Kinglet shows off its distinctive head decor.
I spied today’s first Kinglet as I tramped in my duck boots across our mushy, wet airfield to the mail shack late this afternoon. Kinglets are ground feeders, and this one was hopping among the wet grass finding something of culinary interest.
They are pretty little things with grayish-yellow bodies and a distinctive hairdo that is sort of a combination of black and white skunk stripes centered on a bright yellow Mohawk.
I came across a few more as I tramped homeward through the woods to my place. Kinglets are so small — about the weight of two pennies — and their call so elusive that I halted with a start when I suddenly realized several were pecking at the path just in front of me. They must be finding mites of some kind, my Mad Birder neighbor once suggested.
In a Robert Frosty moment I paused stock still in the dark and deep woods as I listened to the birds’ tinkling, what you might imagine from a parade of magical fairies. The Kinglets’ brilliantly striped heads were the only clear marker of their hops among the shadowy forest duff. I was enchanted.
It remains the gloom of winter on this remote little island nobody’s heard of. I live alone with my dopey orange cat, but even on the quietest days I don’t lack for good company.
P.S. Friends, the date on this post can’t go without comment. If you’ve not already ruminated on the fifth anniversary of the most shameful day in our nation’s history, let former Labor Secretary Robert Reich remind you in this salient essay. Thanks for reading.
My grandfather’s fiddle, which entertained my mother’s family on long winter nights on the South Dakota prairie, hangs behind my Christmas tree at Nuthatch Cabin. We’ll add ornaments to the tree when daughter Lillian arrives Christmas Eve.
IT’S ALL ABOUT LIGHT this week, starting with today, December 21. Happy winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, and Happy almost-final-day of Hanukkah! Both have to do with winter light and what it means to us all.
With just me and Galley Cat in our cabin on this remote little island in the San Juans, life changes significantly when sunrise doesn’t come until almost 8 in the morning and the sky is inky black before 5.
Keeping the woodshed full is a challenge on short December days.
In mid-summer, 5 o’clock is happy hour on my sun-flooded deck. At this time of year when 5 comes around it means I’d better have made my daily trek to the mail shack already or else have my headlamp charged up.
With barely eight hours of daylight, for me it means less time for outdoor chores, and getting up earlier so I have time to split firewood; pick up fallen branches from the latest storm; go for a walk with Galley Cat.
For the resident feline, it means staying inside after 3 p.m. when dusk starts to descend. Having heard frequent owl hoots in recent months and coming eye-to-eye one late afternoon with a Great Horned Owl peering down from my roof, I keep Galley indoors in peak hunting hours. She’s just small enough that big raptors are a worry.
This December, all over Washington State, the dark days have been even tougher in the face of fierce winds, drenching rains and floods. Mild temperatures in our mountains meant rain fell rather than snow, fueling rampaging rivers. On top of all that, nationwide political chaos continued to test our good nature.
Sunrise from Center Island on December 13: a break from the chaotic weather.
More about our winter daylight: My brother in Santa Fe was surprised when I texted him a photo of a spectacular sunrise I witnessed from our Center Island dock as I awaited a water taxi pickup last weekend during a welcome respite from the storms. He was mystified that the photo was taken at 7:58 a.m., which to him seemed quite late for sunrise. The simple explanation: Center Island is at 48.49 degrees north latitude, while Santa Fe, 1,177 miles to south, is at 35.69 degrees. The hours of daylight have to do with the tilt of the earth in its revolutions around the sun this time of year. In winter the Northern Hemisphere tilts away from the sun, so the sun follows a lower, shorter arc across the sky at northern latitudes and sets much earlier than at lower latitudes.
Mild December temperatures mean I still have fuchsias blooming on my deck.
A quick look at the numbers: On today’s winter solstice, Center Island is milking what it can from the sun with 8 hours and 20 minutes of daylight. Santa Fe is enjoying 9 hours and 40 minutes.
Before we Center Islanders cry in our cocoa, we should consider the plight of neighbors to the north. If I lived in Anchorage (61.2 degrees north), I’d get out in daylight for just 5 hours and 28 minutes today. The watery winter sun didn’t peek over the horizon there until 10:14 this morning. That’s just SAD (which happens to be the apt acronym for Seasonal Affective Disorder).
All this came to mind as I put up a 7-foot Noble fir and festooned it with lights in Nuthatch Cabin this week. Whether or not you celebrate the birth of Christ, decking an evergreen with lights is simple self-defense against the dark of December, my brother and I agreed.
How’d that custom start? A quick Google search says:
Christmas trees originated from ancient pagan winter-solstice celebrations using evergreens to symbolize life, evolving into a German Protestant tradition in the 16th century in which trees were decorated with apples and candles, famously popularized globally by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the 1840s, spreading from German immigrants to America and beyond as a beloved Christmas symbol.
Meanwhile, let’s not forget Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights. When a small group of devout Jews defeated an army of oppressors in the 2nd century BCE, a day’s worth of lighting oil miraculously lasted eight days for the victors. With the lighting of candles for eight nights, the modern holiday celebrates spiritual triumph, the victory of light over darkness, and the endurance of faith.
Tomorrow our days start getting longer. What a relief. In these trying times, we could all use another victory of light over darkness.
Cypress Island as seen from our Mount Pickett hike on Thanksgiving morning.
I’M LOVING THESE ISLANDS ever more as I get to know each from the land side rather than just from the water. And as I get to know more of the people.
For decades, my family and I toured on our sailboat every summer throughout the San Juans. We had a rule that every year we must discover at least one new scenic anchorage or hidden cove.
We saw a lot of the islands. But we didn’t meet a lot of the locals that way.
Two things have changed: (1) I live here full-time now and naturally have more chances to hop a ferry with my pickup or bicycle to visit other islands , and (2) My new gig as a tour leader with Road Scholar has rapidly introduced me to more people and places all over the archipelago. For example, while I’d visited the Sunnyfield Farm goat farm on Lopez Island several times before, this past summer I accompanied a Road Scholar group there for a guided tour by Andre, the farm owner and head cheesemaker, whom I’d previously only said hello to in passing. When I took a friend there later in the summer, Andre remembered me. Likewise, I’m now on a first-name basis with Kevin Loftus, the San Juan Historical Museum’s jovial director, a fount of knowledge about these islands. And so on.
I’ve also made a bunch of new local friends who work as guides for Road Scholar.
Orcas Island’s Odd Fellows Hall dates to 1891.
This Thanksgiving reinforced my feelings for other islands, each with their own character, when I spent the holiday with my friend Tom on Orcas Island.
At his suggestion, we joined the free community potluck at the 134-year-old Odd Fellows Hall overlooking the water in Eastsound. Organized by the Odd Fellows and with donated turkey and trimmings, it was open to all islanders as well as visitors, and they got a capacity crowd. I’d guess 200 people shared in the camaraderie and good food. Supplementing the usual fare, everybody brought their favorite holiday dish, from quinoa with salmon to old-fashioned mac ‘n cheese. Pumpkin pies, apple pies and flans! We shared a table with a local mom, Allison, her two teenage sons, and a friendly couple visiting from Tacoma. One of the best-organized volunteer events I’ve ever attended, it further warmed me to Orcas Island and its residents.
Before the feast, Tom and I started our visit with a luxuriant soak in the communal waterfront hot tubs at venerable Doe Bay Resort, about a mile from the cabin he shares with an orange cat named Boxer. We shared the tubs with a local man’s birthday party! We also stopped for coffee at the beautifully renovated Olga Store and toured the Orcas Island Artworks cooperative, housed in a historical strawberry-packing plant at the Olga crossroads. The island nurtures artists working in every medium.
My friend’s Orcas Island cabin, which he has dubbed Belly Acres.
On drizzly Thanksgiving morning, we set out on foot to explore the side of 1,750-foot Mount Pickett in a far-flung corner of Moran State Park. Our trail meandered past more than one monumental old-growth Douglas fir. Not another human to be seen.
Friday afternoon I boarded a homeward-bound water taxi from Obstruction Pass Public Dock for a 20-minute ride back to Center Island.
You may have read previously of my plans to exit these islands. Now, feeling more and more like an at-home San Juanderer, I’m in no hurry to go.
After Christmas with my daughter and her partner on Center Island, I have plans to spend New Years with friends in Friday Harbor, tentatively to include the annual New Year’s Morning bike ride, another fun community event organized by friendly islanders.
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.
The thick moss that upholsters the rocky knoll behind Nuthatch Cabin gets lusher with a summer rain.
FEW THINGS COULD HAVE BEEN MORE WELCOME this morning than to awaken to the patter of raindrops on my Center Island roof.
My rooftop is metal. When I’m abed in my loft, my head is inches from the sharply sloping knotty-pine ceiling and not much farther from the roof outside. Raindrops are like a percussive lullaby, and morning raindrops mean I have the day off from outdoor projects.
It was a celebratory lie-in for me, reading a good book, sipping good coffee and munching toast. The celebration was two-fold: (1) We really needed the rain on my parched and crispy island, and (2) I don’t have thyroid cancer.
I had returned from Seattle yesterday afternoon, following a Monday fine-needle biopsy of a suspicious lump on my thyroid gland.
The thyroid “nodule” (as the docs called it; a less-alarming word than “lump”?) was among discoveries when I did hospital time last December with multiple scans of my innards. After recovering from the ulcer that prompted emergency surgery on Christmas Day, I had a late-January visit with a Swedish Cancer Institute hematologist to find out if the lesions seen on my spleen were something to worry about (apparently not, he decided).
By comparison, the thyroid nodule sounded minor, and frankly I was fed up with being poked and prodded, so I conveniently forgot about it. But my primary-care physician didn’t, and a few weeks ago he prodded me (there’s that word again) to get another ultrasound look at the thing.
The nodule hadn’t disappeared on its own, and on a standard scale used to judge such things, mine was of a size to prompt a FNA, I learned in a MyChart report.
Had to Google that, of course. “FNA” stands for fine-needle aspiration (poking, what did I expect?). It’s a type of biopsy.
“Biopsy.” There’s an ugly word I hadn’t personally experienced before. It meant I had to be tested for cancer.
To ratchet up my apprehension, my primary-care guy phoned me in person less than an hour after the ultrasound finding posted. He’d never done that before. It was no emergency, but he wanted me to schedule the biopsy soon.
So there I was Monday afternoon at the high-rise Optum clinic at 7th and Madison, just off Interstate 5 in Seattle, getting a needle poked into my neck five times while the radiologist attempted to get enough “stuff” (the actual term the doc used) for a reliable analysis. Ick.
It wasn’t pleasant, and I hope not to repeat it. But he gave me a local anesthetic of lidocaine, the same numbing agent most dentists use these days. So all I felt was some unpleasant prodding. Not much poking. In fact, it was a lot like a dentist visit, blessedly without the noise of the high-speed drill and the occasional whiff of smoke from the grinding of tooth enamel.
Absent any actual cutting, the only bandage I wore home was a standard Band-Aid.
I slept on the couch in daughter Lillian’s Roosevelt-district apartment that night. She and a friend had generously taken me out for dinner and a movie to distract from the worry. The doc had said results could take a week.
The dusty blue fruit of Oregon Grape is among this summer’s bumper crops on Center Island.
Tuesday, I did mainland grocery shopping before returning on a 3 p.m. water taxi to my island. The day was muggy and the air unpleasantly smoky from wildfires in the region. As I awakened from a pre-dinner nap, I heard the first of patters on my roof. Stepping to the door, I relished the smell of the freshly rain-washed air, like the aroma of clean sheets on a clothesline. It was a brief reprise of spring rains that nurtured a healthy crop of berries and seedlings in recent months.
I checked my email and with a mild jolt saw that I had a test result waiting on MyChart. I gulped and steeled myself for the news.
It took a moment for me to wade through medical terminology until the word “benign” jumped out at me.
What a relief. For this resident of a remote little island, a cancer finding could have changed my future. Or the rest of my summer, for sure.
Instead, I’m enjoying this showery Wednesday. Breathing deep. Taking a break from outdoor projects. Writing in my hut on the rocky knoll. My happy place.
As my siblings and I often say, getting old ain’t for sissies. For now, though, I feel good, full of energy — and relieved. Stay healthy, friends.
IT WAS DOWN TO THE FRIGGIN’ WIRE, but at 5:32 p.m. on July 31, 2025, I jubilantly fulfilled my pledge to be done by the end of this month with replanking the sizable deck that wraps around Nuthatch Cabin. It was a project begun several years ago.
Whew!
The final stretch, just completed. The lighter planks at the far end will match the rest after a second coat of stain.
I’d have finished last Sunday if I’d not discovered serious dry rot in one of the very last supporting beams I exposed when prying up old planks. Once I’d scraped out the rotten wood I could almost stick my fist into the hole.
I solved that with a can of Bondo, the gooey, hard-curing polyester putty from 3M that car restorers love. It has brought new life to many a rusted out fender on a ’53 Studebaker. I happened to have an unopened can I’d bought years ago for another project but never used. It was still in good shape (no rust on the can!) and did a dandy job repairing the rotting beam.
While that repair cured good and hard, I took a couple of days off the deck repairs for an overnight campout aboard WeLike with my friend Tom from Orcas Island. We lucked into dock space at Prevost Harbor and had fun exploring Stuart island.
Tuesday sunset at Prevost Harbor in the San Juans.
Back at the project today, I finished the last 10 square feet of deck replanking. All that remains is trim work on the railings and a second coat of wood treatment on the final new planks. But it’s done enough to celebrate.
Over the month of toil, I’ve memorized the words to every song on Jimmy Buffett’s “Beaches” album, gotten a tan George Hamilton might have envied, battled sciatica (all that bending) and carpal tunnel issues (all that prying and hammering), and done my best to keep Galley Cat from leaving paw prints in the fresh stain.
Cheers, friends! Tomorrow is August. Right now, I’m pouring a glass of wine and putting my feet up.
Hemlock (the darker wood) started my deck project, with golden cedar now the lumber of choice on this completed first phase of my deck renovation. But it’s not all done yet…
A QUICK JULY HELLO from Center Island, where summer means outdoor projects.
Months ago I committed to setting aside this summer to finally complete the replanking of my 25-year-old, rapidly rotting cedar deck, which had never been treated with any preservative. I started the project a few summers ago in bits and snatches.
The lumber must all be brought over from Sunset Builder’s Supply on Lopez Island. That endeavor is limited by how many 8- and 9-foot planks I can fit into the back of my old Ford pickup, Ranger Rick, and into the cabin of my 20-foot cruiser, WeLike.
The thickness of my wallet has played a role as well. Cedar decking currently sells for $1.06 per foot on Lopez. That’s about 7 cents more than it goes for in mainland Mount Vernon, but a relative bargain compared to the $1.50+ I was paying on Lopez at the height of supply-challenged COVID.
So it’s been a piecemeal effort, involving many hours of yanking nails, prying up old planks, sawing new planks, staining them with a cedar-tone preservative, and drilling and screwing them into place. I’ve even been adding waterproofing caulk atop underpinning supports to lengthen their lifespan.
So, expensive, slow and methodical.
Despite the tortoise pace, over the course of several summers I’ve managed to renew the largest deck area, the 15-foot-by-19-foot surface where I have Adirondack chairs and an umbrella table for entertaining when neighbors drop by for a cold beer or a barbecue.
But plenty remains. Five-foot-deep sections of deck span the front of Nuthatch Cabin and wrap around to the front steps. Here, while I’ve concentrated efforts elsewhere, planks have been gradually collecting moss and lichen and slowly rotting away to the point that arriving guests might just fall through next time they visit. Not quite the welcome I’m looking for.
So, at the end of June I got out the measuring tape. I determined that I needed 651 board feet of lumber to complete the project.
New cedar planks are gradually replacing old across the front of Nuthatch Cabin.
Without delay, I hopped aboard WeLike and spent day after day ferrying cedar from Lopez Island. Other than one quick mid-month trip to Seattle for a doctor appointment and a bit of socializing with friends, I’ve set aside the entire month of July to finish the rebuild. (Today is a rare day of rain, so I get a day to write.)
Just checked my bank statement. I’ve already spent $617 on lumber for this final phase of the rebuild. Not to mention the cost of caulk, stain, deck screws and new Velcro-fastened kneeling pads. The old ones, purchased at the rebuild’s outset, were now held together by duct tape and about as effective as strapping old kitchen sponges onto my 69-year-old knees.
With the mostly sunny days we’ve had, the work has been pretty much nonstop. The days can be hard but the progress is satisfying. In college I read Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” This is like that, but for homeowners. When I groaned a bit about aching joints, my friend Daniel comforted (?) me with a reminder. “The deck lasted 25 years. You’ll never have to replace it again!”
Unless I live to be 94. Not going to think about that.
Keep in mind that I live on a remote island with no trash-removal service. So once the deck is all done, I need to dispose of a large pile of old rotten wood. Can you guess where I’ve been storing it in the meantime? Under the deck!
Galley Cat recuperates in the island sunshine. A trip to the vet can be a marathon when you live on Center Island.
WHEW! It’s been a week.
The good news: WeLike, the much-adored, well-restored 1957 Skagit Express Cruiser that is my island fun boat, is once again spic-and-span and back in the water after a long winter on a trailer.
The boat’s canvas is all mended. The bottom paint is fresh. The decks are scrubbed. In addition, the rocky knoll has had its weeds whacked and moss de-mapled. And Galley Cat is on the mend. More about that in a moment.
Bringing WeLike back to glory has been almost two weeks of intense labor on the part of yours truly. After my wintertime health issues and a long, wet San Juan Islands spring, instead of getting my beloved turquoise tub out on Lopez Sound by March, here it was June already.
The first task was remedying a, um, self-inflicted injury. Last summer when I went to clean her canvas top, I used a handbrush that I found in a gear locker. The brush came with the boat but I had never pulled it out before. As I had the top soaped and sudsy, I scrubbed away like a dedicated washerwoman taking a stain out of the king’s robe. Too late, I realized the brush’s plastic bristles were so stiff they were almost like wire. As I rinsed away the soap, I saw that I’d decimated many rows of stitching.
Luckily, the canvas held together for the summer. But I knew I needed to repair it. Originally it had been sewn on a machine but all I could do was stitch it by hand.
A leather sailor’s palm helped push the needle through canvas as I repaired the top on WeLike.
I ordered sail needles and UV-proof thread from Sailrite, and 10 days ago I got busy. I unzipped the canvas from its frame and for three solid days, stood in the boat’s cabin, all alone under the sun, and stitched. I told myself it was peaceful. Satisfying, rather than tedious. Listened to a lot of Jimmy Buffett.
Just to break up the routine, one day I knocked off early, came home to the cabin and worked for three solid hours with my weed whacker, cutting huge swaths of yard-high grasses on the rocky knoll. Yes, it was a wet spring, and everything grew. Besides weeds, it appeared that every maple seedling ever to drop from my trees had taken root and sprouted on the mossy rocks. A few inches high now, the tiny maples were easy to pull. In another month or two, they’d have real roots. So I labored away, yanking or whacking hundreds of them.
Back to the boat this week, I spent a day rolling new bottom paint, which isn’t so easily done when the boat sits on a low trailer. For one thing, you miss the spots where the hull sits on the trailer pads, but it’s the best I can do without hauling out in a boatyard. Only once did I begin to panic when I momentarily managed to get sort of pinned beneath the trailer axle as I scooted around on my back trying not to drip paint in my eyes as I applied it. One of those fun boat jobs!
WeLike shines when she shines.
The next day I fired up the island tractor and hauled the boat down by the shoreline where I could spray water about without making mud puddles around other trailered boats. On a warm and sunny day, I worked from 10:30 in the morning until 5 p.m., scrubbing every inch of the deck, the hull, the detail work. I used a deck brush in some places and a toothbrush in other spots.
I had consulted the tide chart to see when water would be high enough to use our community launching ramp. Five o’clock it was. So once again in the tractor seat, I backed my newly glittering Express Cruiser down the ramp and into the water.
Before unhooking from the trailer, I needed to be sure the engine started. After sitting untended since October, my beloved (this week) 90-horse Evinrude fired up on the first crank. (Some freshly added non-ethanol gas in the tank probably didn’t hurt.) There was only one catch: After returning forward to unhook from the trailer winch, when I climbed back up onto the boat’s bow and managed to limbo from the side deck into the cabin without falling in the bay, I perched in the skipper’s seat and applied reverse throttle. The engine responded, the water churned. And nothing happened.
I’d backed the trailer deep enough. WeLike should have floated off. I applied more reverse. The outboard roared. Water swirled like a Deception Pass whirlpool. But WeLike wouldn’t budge. After sitting on the trailer’s carpeted pads for eight months, it seemed she was literally stuck.
Happily, the tide was still coming in. I waited five minutes and tried reversing again. No luck. I wondered how many neighbors were now peering toward the harbor, curious at the sound of my roaring outboard on the launch ramp.
Finally, I clambered back out of the cabin, on to the bow, and gingerly stepped down on to the trailer’s tongue. Paranoid now, I first checked that I had indeed released the winch hook from the bow eye. No, I hadn’t made that mistake. So what to do?
As a last resort, balancing on tiptoe on the trailer tongue, I put all my weight into shoving the bow seaward. I shoved, I bounced, I muttered curses. And WeLike finally began to inch deeper into the water.
I quickly climbed back aboard, and all went routinely from there as I found a spot for her at the dock. It was dinnertime after a long day’s toil, so I wasn’t going anywhere on the boat that night. But maybe take her out for fun the next day?
Not to be. By late evening, Galley Cat convinced me she had a problem. For several days she’d been lingering oddly in her litter box. I finally got the message and analyzed the litter scoopings. For several days, she had hardly peed at all. A Google search convinced me that could be serious. Bad Kitty’s Dad for not picking up on it earlier.
I texted Island Express, who kindly offered an earlier-than-usual 7:30 pickup the next morning. By 8:45 Galley was getting an initial exam at the Pet Emergency Center near Mount Vernon. The initial triage by an aide indicated a possible urinary tract infection, but the veterinarian was just going into emergency surgery. The wait for official prognosis would be long.
My homemade sign for No Kings Day on Lopez.
It was very long. We gave them my cell number and drove to a shady park in town. To make this story shorter, I’ll just say that at 4:30 that afternoon we were finally departing the clinic with a UTI diagnosis, meds in hand and $500 added to my Visa bill. We were home around 6.
Sadly, I’m having to cancel my Father’s Day visit with daughter Lillian in Seattle. Got to take care of my kitty cat.
Galley and I both had a lazy day today. Boy, did we need it.
Tomorrow, I’ll be back at it. I’m taking the boat to Lopez with a friend to get rid of trash and pick up lumber for my deck renewal. Saturday, I’m returning for the No Kings Rally in Lopez Village. Today, I made a sign to wave.
This is my relaxing retirement, on a remote little island nobody’s heard of. Summer’s almost here. I hope yours holds promise.
Cantwell's Reef 