Christmas – Cantwell's Reef

AT LEAST IT DIDN’T HAPPEN on my remote little island nobody’s heard of. No helicopter evacs were involved, thank God.

That’s the best thing I can say about my recent up-close-and-personal encounter with America’s emergency health-care system.

Your faithful scribe and cat, happy to be back at the Nuthatch.

Loyal readers, if you were wondering about my long absence from the Reef, it was because I was busy living Brian’s Dreadful December.

When last we shared screen time, I was in the midst of a six-week housesitting stint in the lovely bayview home of friends Daniel and Jean in Olympia. In fact, after the presidential election I had resolved to make Olympia my next home.

That housesitting assignment was to conclude December 15. My plan was to return to my island for a week before hotfooting it back down the highway to spend Christmas with Portland friends Ken and Kate. Their daughter had orchestrated a plan for Christmas Eve dinner at Portland’s posh Ritz-Carlton hotel, followed by a couple of nights for family and friends at her Oregon Coast holiday home.

For me, all those holiday plans began to unravel on Friday the 13th (just like a bad movie).

After three days of serious digestive dysfunction in Olympia, I was on the phone at 7 in the morning to an old college friend — Kathy Pruitt, to whom I’m forever indebted — begging a ride to the nearest Emergency Room.

I had managed to pick up a nasty intestinal bug that over the course of the week had dehydrated me such that my blood pressure registered just 60/30 when they cuffed me in the St. Peter Hospital E.R. Never had I seen so many medical professionals swoop around me so quickly with armloads of I.V. bags, tubes and needles.

I was in the hospital four days before I.V. hydration, a liquid diet and a course of serious antibiotics set me right.

The lost time canceled my December return to Center Island. After a couple days of convalescence with my now-returned Olympia hosts, I packed up Galley Cat and drove straight to my Portland friends’ floating home on the Portland shore of the Columbia River.

On a back channel of the Columbia in Portland, my friends’ floating home is moored behind their sailboat, outlined in lights.

We had a nice few days. Toured a collection of Paul McCartney’s photos at Portland’s art museum. Shopped a holiday bazaar. Had a lovely little solstice party.

Then my digestion went south again. At 7 in the morning on Christmas Eve, I asked my hosts to drive me to another E.R.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the bug I’d suffered had a common side-effect: ulcers of the bowel. Admitted to a hospital in Vancouver, Washington, I got transfusions of five units of blood, then underwent emergency surgery on Christmas Day to stop the bleeding from a duodenal ulcer. Four hours on the table with only a local anesthetic while a surgeon probed my arteries. Ack.

Five more days in a hospital. My holidays were a culinary blur of green Jell-O and steaming yellow broth rumored to have once met a chicken. A far (and gastronomically anguished) cry from the Ritz.

Throughout the ordeal, my chums in Olympia and Portland showed me what true friendship means. The day after Christmas, daughter Lillian flew out from her new home of Philadelphia. Three weeks of her unsparing help and support was a godsend as I convalesced, first at my friends’ homes down south and finally at the Seattle-area home of my ever-generous sister-in-law Julie. I struggled to overcome stamina-robbing anemia and low blood-counts. In a quick trip to Center Island last weekend Lillian helped me transport my belongings and a carload of groceries homeward before I had to return to Seattle for final medical exams.

Tuesday night I drove Lillian to catch a Philly-bound plane. Wednesday, already halfway into January, I finally returned on my own to Nuthatch Cabin for some long-anticipated nesting and recovery time with Galley Cat.

With temperatures stuck in the 40s here, last summer’s fuchsias are still blooming on my deck. Blazes in the wood stove cheer the cabin nightly. Awakening mornings in my loft, I look out to watch each day unveil itself, whether wrapped in mist or warmed by the sun’s first lemony fingers caressing the treetops.

I’m getting back into my fitness routine, including a daily half-hour on the stationary bike. So far, so good. (Thursday I included two naps in my day’s itinerary. So I’m not overdoing.)

I’m working to boost my hemoglobin count, including another in a lineup of steak dinners tonight. Red meat isn’t my dietary norm but it helps bolster my blood, along with iron supplements.

For now, Galley Cat and I are both just glad to be home on our island. She’s back hunting the mice that live under the woodshed. I’ve returned to pleasant afternoons tapping the keyboard in my writing hut. Day by day, I’m encountering the rock’s few winter neighbors and chatting them up after my long absence. Sunny skies and coppery sunsets are a healing balm.

For now, I want to pull up the drawbridge and never leave. I hope your January offers comforts as dear.

Madrona in the snow: Looking from Center Island toward Decatur Island during my morning walk.

OH, WE’RE HAVIN’ A HEAT WAVE, a tropical heat wave… Well, it got up to 25 degrees Fahrenheit today on Center Island. After a couple of days this week when the red stuff in the outdoor thermometer didn’t budge above 15, that’s saying something. Not much, but something.

Christmas arrived in the San Juans along with a blast of Siberian cold, snow and wind that hasn’t quite ended.

With all that in the forecast last week, daughter Lillian and I canceled our long-planned Christmas rendezvous with friends at the Washington coast. Instead, Lil and her friend Bianca, a former college roommate with whom she remains close, joined me at the Nuthatch for a quiet and cozy celebration with plenty of good food, mulled wine, games, puzzles and favorite old movies. We went caroling at the island farm (“Good King Wenceslas” was our forte) and had a snowball fight on the airfield.

Lillian, left, and friend Bianca on a snowy Feast of Stephen, also known as December 26.

We didn’t wake up to a white Christmas, but by evening the flakes were falling fast, allowing us to enjoy the magic of dimming lights inside the cabin and turning on outside lights above the front wall of windows to experience a mesmerizing eyeful of what I call “Snow Theater.”

Thoughtful friends and family remembered me with many cards and gifts. It was a good Christmas, but as many surmised, it wasn’t easy without my sweet wife and Lillian’s dear mum. Christmas was Barbara’s favorite time of year. We did our best to honor the standard she set and replicate the joy she brought to it. Of course it wasn’t the same, but it was the best way to show our love.

Tracks in the snow told who’d been there before me, whether two-legged or four.

Monday I braved snowy highways to return Lillian and Bianca to Seattle. I returned via water taxi to my island on Tuesday to learn that many neighbors had frozen pipes. (Mine are OK.)

This morning dawned quiet and sunny. Winds were light, the air remained frigid and the snow wasn’t melting. A perfect morning to bundle up for an invigorating tramp around the island with my camera. It was fun to try to read prints in the snow. Was that a deer crossing the road? A fox treading the path behind my knoll?

The continuing cold has helped quash a planned visit by friends for the New Year’s holiday. So Galley Cat and I will be partying alone as we welcome 2022. For me, the year to come holds the adventure of a 10-week voyage with some other chums on a 37-foot powerboat up the Inside Passage to Alaska, and the hope that we might all be able to resume safe travels to faraway places, one of my joys in life. For Galley, there’s probably hope for more runs up the knoll. Maybe better-quality kitty tuna. Her needs are simple. I think we can work on that.

Whatever your wishes, here’s hoping.