Just messing about in boats is hard to beat

Lopezian friends David Foutch and Lynn Thompson with WeLike at Fossil Bay on Sucia Island.

MY LOPEZ ISLAND FRIENDS Lynn and David recently posed one of those “can’t hardly say no” questions:

“Would you take us in your boat to see Sucia Island if we pay for the gas and bring a picnic?”

Does a kid say no to chocolate cake with ice cream and Cool Whip?

For years my friends had heard me speak glowingly of Sucia, my favorite island of the San Juan Archipelago. My family and I had taken our sailboat there every summer for about 20 years running. Lynn and David, who live most of the year in Seattle but spend plenty of time at a lovely getaway home near Iceberg Point on Lopez, had never been to Sucia, a popular marine state park that is humanly populated full-time only by a ranger or two (along with herons, eagles, kingfishers, otters, seals and other wild creatures). It is in the far-flung northeastern-most part of our island chain.

WeLike was built by Skagit Boat Co. of La Conner in 1957.

Lynn, now retired, was a colleague and chum of mine at The Seattle Times. Her husband, David, is a semi-retired Boeing engineer who still works for the Lazy B three days a week, even when they spend weeks on Lopez. He is part of a group studying how to make air travel carbon-neutral, a worthy goal if ever there was one.

Honestly, I’d have jumped at the chance to show them Sucia even without the promise of gas money. But David is still collecting a regular paycheck, so I didn’t feel too guilty. Besides, when we pulled up to the Blakely Island fuel dock on a pristine morning last Wednesday, I pumped in only 5-1/2 gallons rather than fill my voluminous tanks. That was an act of mercy; the ethanol-free gas my Evinrude 90 prefers was selling for $7.52 a gallon. Ouch.

David and Lynn wanted to walk up the dock to the Blakely Island Store, which I had never visited on previous stops for fuel. It was a pleasant diversion, with fresh-baked doughnuts, at a beautiful spot with waterfront views of Orcas and Obstruction islands. An old-school attraction outside the store: a telephone booth with an actual functioning pay phone, among the last in the islands.

By 11 a.m. we arrived at Sucia’s Fossil Bay, with hopes of finding space at one of the two docks. A challenge this day: At 12:30 Sucia would experience one of its lowest ebb tides of the year, at minus 3.1 feet. That meant that even 20-foot WeLike, which needs less than two feet of water to stay afloat, might be sitting on the bottom at near-shore parts of the docks.

But as we entered the bay a big motoryacht was exiting. A correspondingly large space was open at one of the docks, well away from shore. We nabbed 20 feet of moorage.

We chatted with other friendly boaters (“Let the Fun BE GIN” quipped one skipper’s T-shirt) while the vintage WeLike collected her share of admiring comments from passersby old enough to remember 1957 Chevys of a similar color and design.

We then enjoyed a couple hours of hiking on the island, with a picnic stop at the memorial bench dedicated to my late wife, Barbara. The bench, financed by a GoFundMe effort Lynn had donated to, commands one of Sucia’s best viewpoints. From a shoreside bluff it takes in a splendid panorama of Patos, Waldron and Orcas islands in the San Juans and looks across Boundary Passage to Saturna and Pender in Canada’s Gulf Islands. Kayakers paddled by just beneath us and a bald eagle zoomed just above our heads as we munched tasty cold chicken grilled by David, apple-berry cole slaw that I contributed, and Lynn’s delectable chocolate espresso cookie bars. Tim’s-brand potato chips from the Blakely store ensured our salt levels didn’t plunge.

Your loyal correspondent at Barbara’s bench on Sucia Island. Lynn Thompson photo.

As we departed around 2, the tide was flooding in like kids to a schoolroom at recess’s end. Light winds made for a relatively easy passage back to the public dock at Lopez where I dropped Lynn and David.

A successful day trip on a good old boat. Hard to wish for better.

All play and no work in the islands? Not quite.

Spraying fresh paint on a favorite Adirondack chair constituted one of the checkmarks on my summer to-do list so far.

ISLAND SUMMERS HAVE THEIR JOYS, for sure. Bare-chested lunches on my warm deck. Watching Galley Cat roll luxuriously in the sunshine. Watering my new aspen as its leaves quake in a breeze. But sweet doesn’t come without sweat. It’s the season of cabin maintenance and outdoor projects.

One of the magnets on the Nuthatch’s venerable Kenmore fridge holds up my Summer 2026 to-do list that fills most of an 8-1/2 by 11 page. I won’t likely check off every item, but I’ll do my best to knock the hell out of it before fall rains set in.

The past couple days I’ve worked to exhaustion, accomplishing two big projects.

Yesterday, I finally pulled off the sprawling tarp that had protected my 20-foot cuddy-cabin cruiser, WeLike, from dirt, dust and weather as it sat on its trailer near the island clubhouse since last October. Usually the boat’s in the water by March, but I had a busy spring helping my friend get his novel published — reviewing multiple edits, responding to queries, generally acting as the umpire between author and publisher. My retirement days have been packed as of late.

A chrome nameplate identifies the La Conner-based builder of *WeLike.*

The tarp covered most of the boat, but a six-foot section of each side deck was exposed. And those patches were filthy and crusted with months’ worth of fallen fir needles. I spent hours with brushes, scrub pads and soapy water to bring the old girl back to respectability before hitching trailer to tractor and launching WeLike into Read’s Bay, our little nook of the Salish Sea. Tied to the dock, she looks shipshape and Bristol fashion.

The previous day I accomplished a, um, stinky project that had topped my procrastination list for several years. You might not be surprised to hear it had to do with my sewer system.

Nuthatch cabin was built at the end of the 1990s. The septic system shortly pre-dated a code change that now requires inspection ports in the drainfield.

An unavoidable part of rural life, especially on a remote island like mine, is being chief custodian of your own sewage system. “It’s a shitty job but somebody has to do it,” you might say. But I’m classier than that, you know?

As said custodian, several years back I ventured to the county seat in Friday Harbor to take a class designed to teach homeowners how to maintain their own septic systems. “This is the most expensive appliance you will ever own!” the dour instructor informed us. Screw it up and the replacement cost might be $40,000, he said with an expression to rival The Wizard of Oz‘s Miss Gulch as she recited Toto’s misdeeds.

Positioning a final inspection port on my septic drainfield required bushwhacking through waist-high salal and swordferns.

In the class, I also learned about the required inspection ports. Without them I would not be able to sell my property when the time comes. I think I saw a self-satisfied twinkle in the instructor’s eye when he imparted this fact.

The ports are just what they sound like. First I had to locate the drainfield and dig down a foot to find the thick plastic domed shell that creates a tunnel for the effluent that has been digested by microbes in the septic tank before flowing onward — if everything is working as it should.

An inspection port four-inches in diameter is required within a few feet of each end of the drainfield. For me, that meant using a four-inch hole saw to create an opening in the dome for permanent insertion of a length of PVC pipe topped by a removable cap. The objective: to enable the eager homeowner to peer down and see what’s there. Oh, yum.

To shorten a long story: Installing the port nearest the septic tank was relatively easy, once I used a garden trowel to dig down and follow the pipe exiting my tank. The big challenge was at the far end: locating it amid a tangle of salal and swordferns that had grown up over the drainfield in the past 27 years.

A new bamboo fountain burbles on my front deck. Birds drink from it in the dry days of summer.

Construction drawings for my place, bestowed upon me by my earnest friend with San Juan County, showed a single 50-foot drain line reaching across the open space in front of my home. The only way I could locate the far end was to use two-by-fours placed end to end to create a straight line, stopping to dig every six or seven feet to ensure I was on the right course.

Thursday, I located part of the domed structure one foot below the salal and approximately 47 feet from the start of the field. Eureka! I drilled my inspection hole, installed the port and called it done.

Good news: Peering into the new port, all I saw below was dry, bare soil. That means every bit of stinky brown water is soaking into the ground as intended. I won’t have to remortgage my place to buy a new “appliance.”

Other little projects of recent weeks: restitching WeLike’s canvas top and rewiring two defunct bilge pumps; painting a favorite Adirondack chair whose original stain had given up to winter rains and summer sun; and replacing the worn-out bamboo fountain on my deck, which is a favorite hot-weather watering hole for island songbirds.

Rebuilding my back porch before summer’s end is the 800-pound gorilla on my to-do list. I’ve started bringing home more cedar deck planks from the Lopez Island lumber yard, and I’ve set aside the week after next to get a start on it.

The best part of all this? It feels really good to check something off the list. Now I’m gonna go put my feet up. The Adirondack chair beckons…

Summer comes to the San Juans

Fittingly, children powered the Earth float in Saturday’s Solstice Parade on Orcas Island. Photo by Thomas Willard.

HAPPY SOLSTICE! It’s almost 10 p.m. and there’s still a good bit of light in my Center Island sky this evening. It’s the longest day of the year.

I marked summer’s debut yesterday with a visit to neighboring Orcas Island, where my friend Tom hosted me at the annual Solstice Parade through the village of Eastsound. It was a celebration of island whimsy and gentle spirit, with human-powered floats, wacky costumes, a winged woman on stilts, a baton-twirling drill squad and much more.

Here are a few of my favorite images from the parade.

Islanders of every age paraded elaborate costumes and exhibited high spirits.

We welcomed the summer sun’s return to the San Juans.

Nothing says summer like a flamingo-headed wild woman in a lacy pink skirt. Photo by Thomas Willard

Happy summer, all.

Surf’s up in the San Juans

Oceanspray blossoms fill the forest understory on Center Island.

If you’re viewing this post from an email alert, click on the headline to see the full graphic design of “Cantwell’s Reef.”

IT’S MID-JUNE ON CENTER ISLAND. My meadow’s wildflowers came and went in May, and the wild roses with their pink blush and nose-tickling scent are almost a memory.

But we can always depend on a sudden wild splash of creamy, sun-catching florabundance just before the summer solstice when the oceanspray blooms. Bearing large tassels comprising scores of starry florets, oceanspray virtually floods our forest with waves of white.

This woody shrub (Holodiscus discolor) is native from Southern British Columbia to Southern California, with variations reaching into South America. It typically ranges from three to 10 feet in height, and spreads like crazy in open forest floor like the front of my island plot.

It’s also known as ironwood, for the hardness of its woody stalk. According to the website Native Plants PNW, native tribes used the wood for many tools and utensils. Rendered even harder by heating it over a fire and polishing it with horsetail stems, the wood was used for salmon-roasting tongs because it won’t burn, for digging sticks, fishing hooks, needles, canoe paddles, bows, and spear, harpoon, and arrow shafts. Oceanspray pegs were even used in construction when nails were not available.

Every June, the blooms are a welcome sight that welcomes summer to the San Juans.

Speaking of which: The 2026 summer solstice occurs on Sunday, June 21, at 1:24 a.m. PDT. This exact astronomical moment marks the official start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and brings the longest day — with 15 hours and 59 minutes of daylight in our islands — and shortest night of the year.

I’m marking the event by participating with a friend in Orcas Island’s homespun Solstice Parade through downtown Eastsound. What are your plans?

My island life happens every day

An American Goldfinch, our Washington State bird, peers back at me from my birdfeeder.

**If you’re reading from an email alert, click on this post’s headline to see the full graphic design of Cantwell’s Reef.**

I FLEW AWAY FOR TWO WEEKS and everything changed at home.

The foxglove bloomed! The goldfinches fledged! The kale is ready to harvest!

My trip to France was a refresher, a challenge, a kick in the pants. But as an old hermit who lives on a 176-acre island, I’ve come to realize these little daily changes that tick along with the clock on my kitchen wall now seem to matter to me most.

Summer is coming. Keep an eye peeled.

Stalks of lilac-hued foxglove flowered on Center Island while I was off gallivanting in France.

Dinner tonight will include a salad from Nuthatch Cabin’s rail-mounted planter. In my two-week absence, the kale grew like I did the summer I was 14 and consuming a quart of milk and half a box of Cheerios every day.
The marigold seedlings are coming along nicely, too.

Life goes on, it happens ev’ry day. So appreciate what you got, before it’s taken away. — Ray Davies, The Kinks

This spring on Center Island, a full night’s sleep is but a flickering dream

A female Northern Flicker clings to a fir outside Nuthatch Cabin. Male and female Flickers share similar markings except for the male’s dark “moustache” stripe from beak to cheek.

IT MUST BE SPRING. The jackhammers are waking me and Galley Cat in the morning.

Don’t get the wrong idea. I haven’t abandoned Nuthatch Cabin for a one-bedroom walk-up above a shawarma joint in Queens. No, this soundtrack of heavy construction is from my friend the Flicker.

Not “My Friend Flicka,” the 1950s TV series about a Wyoming kid and his horse. No, this disturber of my island peace is a Flicker. A Northern Flicker, to be precise. A type of woodpecker.

I’ve always admired these handsome birds with the gently curving beak. The speckled gray breast and darkly striped back suggests the look of a plump British earl in a satin vest and charcoal morning coat, off to see the horseraces. Possibly at the invitation of a duke.

But my admiration has come under strain on recent mornings.

It started about two weeks ago. About 7 a.m. I was jolted from a dreamy sleep. Galley, who usually snoozes on my feet, was up on all fours with wild eyes. A noise that seriously resembled a pneumatic jackhammer was reverberating throughout the cabin.

“A friggin’ woodpecker!” I quickly realized.

I bolted out of bed to run downstairs and out the front door, barefoot and in my nightwear, to look angrily roofward and shout the first forceful, manly exclamation I could articulate: “SHOO!”

The Nuthatch and its resident nut: The peaked metal roof is a favorite of Flickers.

A Flicker nonchalantly fluttered away to a tree next door.

Since then it has recurred every few days. Once, I spotted another Flicker (if not the Flicker) at the tiptop of my steeply peaked metal roof. The timing is always the same. I’ve been repeatedly rousted from my bed. This morning I tried to ignore it, but it didn’t stop. And the effect of the hammering on metal truly is like trying to relax inside a bass drum during a rousing Sousa march.

Interestingly, my friend Hilary on Bainbridge Island just recently told of a Flicker attacking her home’s metal gutters. And my island neighbor, the Mad Birder, said a big Hairy Woodpecker was after his metal roof a couple days ago. The odd thing is: In 23 years at the Nuthatch, this is the first time I remember this happening.

It’s a mating-season thing, the M.B. assured me. I figured it was a testosterone phenomenon, with boys trying to impress the girlies with that jackhammering on metal. But with woodpeckers, both genders drum to attract dates, M.B. pronounced. And just to cement his Mad Birder cred, he informed me that he could distinguish between different woodpeckers, sight unseen, simply by the cadence of their drumming. (I bow to genius. As long as he keeps sharing his Laphroaig when I visit.)

Anyway, happy springtime! You’ll understand if you spy me dashing out of my cabin in Dawn’s Early Light shaking a fist at the roof.

Just help me out by shouting “SHOO!”

THIS SATURDAY, MARCH 28: Friends, join me and millions of other Americans for the third nationwide No Kings Rally, likely to draw the largest turnout of any protest in history. Everybody and every body counts. Sign up and get details about a rally near you: Find the map and plug in your ZIP code at www.nokings.org.

Immunize against woes by sharing your joys

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.”

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.

Sometimes life among the trees has its snags

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.

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!

These are tumultuous times. Stay safe, friends.

Tiny Kinglets are good company

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.

Happy solstice! Let there be light.

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.