Capital times in Olympia

Mount Rainier dominates the horizon above downtown Olympia, as seen from the West Bay Drive home I’m housesitting.

SO WHAT’S HAPPENING IN OLY TOWN? It’s December already, my six weeks of housesitting time is winding down, and somehow I got distracted by the news of November.

Here I sit looking out from West Bay Drive to the snowy majesty of Mount Rainier looming over downtown on a blue-sky afternoon. Other than trying to ignore the news in recent weeks, I’ve had some nice visits with friends and family and gotten to know this town again.

Some of my visitors probably won’t believe Olympia can be sunny and that Rainier looms large here. We’ve had our share of socked-in days of featureless low clouds, especially on days when I’ve had visitors. My buddy R.J., whom I call the Unitarian Librarian, was here from Moscow, Idaho, for three gloomy days in late November. He’ll never believe the sun shines on the state capital. Same for yesterday when longtime friends Dave and Jill from Port Orchard came for lunch and a genial hike around the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. Despite the glum day, we enjoyed sighting two Bald Eagles in the top of a tall fir. Among troops of migrating waterbirds on the tideflats, a flock of maybe a hundred Dunlins performed their signature aerial acrobatics in which the flock navigated amazing hair-trigger zigzags above the Nisqually tide flats, seeming to disappear in thin air and then astonishingly reappearing on a different tack. Worth the trip!

But today I’m on my own, and the day is blue and beautiful. I won’t complain.

With R.J., I revisited McLane Creek to see the spawning salmon. It was a new and mesmerizing experience for my friend, who grew up on a farm near Spokane. Because he’d not explored Olympia before, I took him to the Capitol building, thinking we’d poke our nose inside briefly. But at the entry we met a tour guide named Terry. “Are you here for the 1 o’clock tour?” he asked. We shook our heads. “Would you like a tour? It’s exactly 1 o’clock and nobody else is here.”

A Tiffany-created chandelier hangs inside the Capitol dome.

So purely through serendipity, we got a delightful private tour of the Capitol. I had spent a lot of time in that building during a reporting internship in college days, but on this visit I learned much more about it. For example, I never knew that there are 42 steps leading to the entrance, celebrating the fact that Washington was the 42nd state admitted to the Union. I never knew that the giant chandelier hanging inside the dome was crafted by Tiffany (as were light fixtures throughout the building), or that the Capitol campus was designed by the Olmsted Brothers, famed landscapers whose father was one of the lead designers of New York’s Central Park.

I especially enjoyed stepping into the foyer of the governor’s office, where huge portraits of past governors looked down on visitors. Caught up in a moment of wonder, I recounted to tour-guide Terry my “six degrees of separation” links to a handful of those governors. “Arthur Langlie’s granddaughter is a friend of mine. And my daughter just finished working at Rosellini’s Bakery in Seattle, run by a descendant of Albert Rosellini. Dan Evans was president of my college and I got to know him a bit in my tenure as editor of the college newspaper. And I had dealings with Dixy Lee Ray when I interned here.” It was a reminder that I am definitely a Washingtonian.

The day after R.J. returned to Idaho, my daughter Lillian and our friend Lux arrived to help me celebrate Thanksgiving. We enjoyed several days of exploring the town, where Lux had grown up and Lillian had gone to college. Both enjoyed seeing Olympia looking like it’s on an upswing, they said. Some boarded up storefronts remain, but new shops and eateries are moving in along with more residents as new downtown apartment buildings have gone up.

The mist-shrouded Capitol dome rises above Capitol Lake in Olympia.

After a misty morning walk around Capitol Lake, we joined in a fun all-day collaboration cooking our Thanksgiving feast. Meat-eschewers Lil and Lux’s main dish was a Trader Joe creation, a Vegan Breaded Turkey-less Roast with Gravy, while I roasted my first-ever Rock Cornish Game Hen. Side dishes included roasted Brussels sprouts and golden beets, sage-crazy stuffing with walnuts and celery, mashed potatoes, mashed rutabaga, and Lillian’s specialty, luscious mushroom gravy. Her rich and delicious pumpkin pie with plant-based whipped cream concluded our evening’s repast.

Lillian’s pumpkin pie, delicious despite a slight crust malfunction.

For years, my daughter and I reserved a special day to go Christmas shopping together at Seattle’s Pike Place Market. But with her imminent departure for a new home in Philadelphia (prompted by a new job for her partner), we decided Friday was perfect to go shopping in downtown Olympia. We enjoyed hours nosing about a delightful local bookstore, the Traditions shop specializing in fair-trade artisanal imports, plus several lively boutiques and specialty stores. We ambled back up the hill to West Bay Drive laden with holiday packages and good secrets.

That afternoon, the three of us jumped in the car and headed out Highway 101 to Kennedy Creek, another well-known salmon-spawning stream. We got to chat with two knowledgeable docents there who told us this year brought a larger than usual run of 40,000 chum salmon to Kennedy Creek. The only downside, one of the experts told us: In their effort to find good nesting areas among the pebbly creek bottom, later-arriving fish tend to destroy the egg nests built by earlier arrivals. A bittersweet ending for all the effort these fish expend in returning from the ocean to the freshwater stream of their birth.

I’ve 12 days left here before friends Daniel and Jean return from visiting with their new grandson in California. I have one more special dinner on the calendar, with an old college housemate. I’ll put a bit more energy into looking at housing, and maybe I’ll take in a Christmas show before I go.

Then it’s back to Center Island for me and Galley Cat for a week before I join Portland friends for my first Christmas without family around me. But that’s really a misstatement; my Portland friends Ken and Kate are really family to me, as are so many others I’ve mentioned. Happy holidays to you all.

I’m thinking Oly for my future

Autumn color helps frame the Capitol dome in Olympia. At 287 feet high, it is the tallest self-supporting masonry dome in the United States. Dome trivia: Washington, D.C.’s U.S. Capitol dome, made of cast iron, is just one foot taller.

THIS DECISION WAS MADE FOR ME, by millions of unbelievably misguided American voters.

Until November 6, I was uncertain where my next move would be after more than six years of living full-time on delightful Center Island.

The morning the presidential election result became evident, I knew Olympia would be my new address. It was as clear to me as the town’s famous artesian water.

While I hate to leave the lovely San Juan Islands and my friends there, I was already considering this. I need more social interaction and community involvement than I get on an island with only 15 winter residents. Even the “big town” of Friday Harbor feels too removed from the action now.

I’m currently housesitting for friends for six weeks at their comfortable Olympia home overlooking Budd Inlet and downtown. It’s not my first time here, and I’ve always liked the town. I got my B.A. here at The Evergreen State College in the 1970s, and I still have college friends in town. My late parents chose this as a retirement community, so I visited many times in the 1990s. My daughter was part of Evergreen’s Class of 2013, so I was here for dorm move-ins, parental visits, and graduation.

This election was a sea change. As soon as I knew the outcome, I was certain I wanted to be in this little center of power in Blue America.

Here I can work for the American resistance. For now, Washington state, and its capital, remain something of a refuge. While the national results were not what I chose, our state “had a very good election,” Pramila Jayapal, my congresswoman when I lived in Seattle, told an online national gathering of almost 150,000 resisters a couple days after the election. “If anything, the state went bluer.”

Visitors play on the Rainbow Rails, a decorated stretch of abandoned railroad trestle on Olympia’s Budd Inlet. When someone repainted the rail ties black and white during last June’s Pride Month in what some labeled a hate crime against the LGBTQ community, volunteers immediately stepped forth with paint brushes to renew the rainbow colors.

Every statewide office went to a Democrat on November 5, and the Dems’ control of both houses of the Legislature grew by a few seats. The new governor-elect, Attorney General Bob Ferguson, was a national leader in filing largely successful legal challenges to the blunders of the first Trump Administration.

That galvanized my thinking. For me, Olympia can be a bastion of kinder, smarter public life. I will support the resistance by supporting this community, doing what I can to make it stronger.

If I live in Olympia, I can testify before the Legislature when good laws are being debated. It’s familiar ground: As a college student, I interned with a public television news program covering a legislative session. Living in Oly, I can add my boots on the ground to the causes of publicly minded nonprofits. When the red hats come to town, I will join the defenders of democracy waving signs on the Capitol steps. I can be a noisy old fart working for the good guys.

The choice seems simple now. This is a time and place, like 1930s Europe, when nobody gets the luxury of sitting innocently on the sidelines. My physical move will take some time — a year, or even two. But our free nation is under siege. For the moment the bozos who want us under their thumb have the edge.

It might be a battle for the rest of my life. It’s time to get started.

Letter from Olympia on Nov. 4

One of my first activities in Olympia: joining a men’s hiking group on a pleasant autumn trek on Sequalichew Creek, near Dupont.

THIS ISLANDER IS ON SABBATICAL, but my island’s wild winds have followed me to Washington State’s capital city.

Here’s my quick day-before-the-election report.

I awakened today to lashing rain. Fierce winds are ripping golden leaves from the autumn trees and prepping them for winter. Lights in the house are occasionally flashing here on Oly’s West Bay Drive, where I look out through a bank of picture windows to Budd Inlet and the cityscape of sailboat masts, new apartment buildings and a broad swath of state offices. I’m house-sitting for six weeks for my friends Daniel and Jean.

I’ve been here a week. Took a hike with Daniel’s all-male hiking group, a bunch of gray-headed guys with tales to tell, many of them from influential positions in state government. Took a long solo walk down Olympia’s Fourth Avenue, past Bohemian coffee shops and cafes, more than one “junque” store selling other people’s discarded treasures, and a few boarded-up storefronts. But there’s also the elegant new Assyrian restaurant, and the soon-to-open holiday skating rink with a view of the stately capitol dome. Ended up at Olympia Coffee Roasters, where I plunked down 20 bucks for a bag of delicious Ethiopian Abore medium-roast beans (“flavors of berries, chocolate and cream”).

I’m here, in part, to decide if this is where I want to live next. Part of my long-term Center Island exit strategy. I’ve joined a gym. I’ll go to local events and shows. I’ll get reacquainted with the community where I went to college almost 50 years ago.

But I’ve another objective in writing today.

Tomorrow is Election Day, the final day to cast our votes in the most important election of our lives. A day when we choose to keep our freedoms or give them up to an unbalanced, narcissistic tyrant. A day when America chooses to give democracy another chance or gives up on everything everybody has fought for and lets chaos reign.

It’s that simple. We’re like the Germans in the early 1930s. The choice we make tomorrow, for good or bad, will shake our world.

I’ve done what I can to help the good guys. I’ve written 250 get-out-the-vote letters to swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. I’ve donated $1,500 of my meager bank account to the Harris campaign.

I’m not looking for credit or thanks for that. But I am asking loyal readers to stop and think: Have you cast your ballot yet? Has everyone in your family cast their ballot? Does anybody you know need help or encouragement to cast their ballot? This is not an election to sit out. If there’s anybody you know who needs help or persuasion, today is the day. Please write or call your friends, family and neighbors. Make sure they’ve voted.

Keep up the hope. Keep up the optimism. But, please, do what you can for the good guys.

Then we’ll all keep our fingers crossed.

Thank you,

Brian