THIS CAME IN MY EMAIL and they asked me to post it. Not something I usually do in this venue, but it’s absolutely not a year to be neutral.
If you want to take action that might help get out the vote in crucial swing states, please join me in writing letters for Vote Forward, which aims to mobilize potential voters in communities that have historically been marginalized in the political process—such as people of color, women, and young voters.
Without naming a candidate or party, such letters encourage voters who likely support democracy and the U.S. Constitution to turn out in strategic states and districts. It’s a proven tool that can make a significant difference in close races. I like it because it’s something I can do from my kitchen table on my remote island far from the action. (We have daily mail pickup, even here.) At the Democratic convention last month, Michelle Obama urged us all to “Do something!” This is something I can do, whereas putting a sign in my yard doesn’t have much impact.
Your choice of political party doesn’t really matter this year, it’s a choice of candidates and their clear impact on our nation’s future. Just yesterday, more than 100 Republican former national security and foreign policy officials endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a joint letter, calling Donald Trump “unfit to serve” another term in the White House. Even former vice president Dick Cheney, neocon poster boy for the G.W. Bush administration, has endorsed Harris.
From a little island nobody’s heard of, that’s my nickel’s worth of politics. Autumn is election season! Don’t sit it out this year.
Soft autumnal colors stretch to the Cascade foothills as the Padilla Bay Shore Trail winds along Little Indian Slough in the Skagit Valley.
I KIND OF LOVE MY ROUTINES on this little outpost surrounded by saltwater. Maybe it says something about me. I’m an island dweeb.
For example, the Big Monthly Shopping Trip to the Mainland is one of my highlights. And if I don’t follow a set routine I don’t get everything I like to have in my fridge and pantry.
So I keep a magnetized pad on my fridge and add to my shopping list every time I notice I’m low on something. If I don’t immediately add it to the list, chances are I’ll dork out at the grocery and forget about it. And next week I don’t get my nightly piña colada yogurt treat. No cinnamon to sprinkle on a ripe pear. No peanut butter in which to dip my lunchtime celery. (Horrors!)
That might all sound trivial to the landlubbers among you — those who don’t have to cross a saltwater strait to find a Fred Meyer or Costco. But it’s a serious concern when one lives on an island with no stores, where even a 7-Eleven would be luxury. (Access to a rotisserie hot dog, just down the block, rain or shine, any day of the year? You better know how lucky you are.)
Yesterday was my big monthly shopping day, and as my shopping days go, it was Extra Big. The larder was low. The pantry cupboards were no longer sagging under the weight of extra Paul Newman pasta sauce, flagons of avocado oil, or lashings of Chunk Light Tuna. Autumn is here, it’s time to stock up!
I grabbed the shopping list on my way out the door to catch the 9 a.m. Island Express water taxi to Anacortes. I would have until 5 p.m. before catching the last boat back. Plenty of time to shop, right?
As is my custom, I used the morning boat ride to divvy up the shopping among my three customary shopping venues: Costco, Freddy’s and Trader Joe’s.
With TJ’s in the plan, that meant a drive to Bellingham, Joe’s nearest locale. Even better, as shopping days went: extra adventure in one of my favorite towns. Brew pubs! Waterfront trails! Food trucks!
Also on the to-do list was a stop at a post office for more stamps for my Vote Forward letter-writing efforts, along with a haircut. (I really don’t do well cutting it myself I conceded after that time with the big bald patch on one side.)
I roughly calculated the time needed for all these stops, and realized I might be running for that 5 o’clock boat. So I prioritized. First stop: the cheap hair salon in Mount Vernon. The hair was getting seriously bush-like.
After a half hour of rapid snipping, oddly chopping and “how high is your part usually?” questions, the obviously inexperienced young woman behind the scissors set me loose considerably more light-headed, if slightly off-kilter up top.
On the chance that Bellingham was too ambitious, I decided to do the bulk of my shopping in nearby Burlington. First stop: Costco.
Though the prices and quality are good, Costco infuriates me with (A) the quantity you must purchase (Nuthatch Cabin doesn’t have storage for 30 rolls of T.P.!), and (B) the lack of basic supermarket organizational signage indicating which aisle holds canned corn and which is home to raisins.
So I had no choice but to race up and down every food aisle in search of the dozen items on my list. When driving one of those Costco carts that could double as a minivan for a family of four, speed is dangerous. I nearly took out several track-suited homemakers on a field trip from Sedro-Woolley and had a near miss with an octogenarian couple deep in debate over whether to get the regular prunes or pop for the organic.
But I had Bellingham on my mind. Dassn’t tarry.
After spending $191 at Costco, I lucked into a parking space within sight of Fred Meyer’s front door. I grabbed a large cart and tackled the longest part of my shopping list. I bought every carton of piña colada yogurt in their dairy case. Picked out enough shiny red apples to bake a crumble and slice for lunches for weeks. Piled the cart high. Filled seven bags at checkout. The tab: $174.
Back at the car, I laboriously packed my purchases into plastic totes and insulated cold-bags, then jumped in, steered toward Interstate 5, and put the pedal down for B-Town.
As I sped northward at 74 mph, my mind caught up with my accelerator foot. I let up on the gas a bit. Did I really need a Trader Joe’s stop? I might miss the extra bag of dry roasted but unsalted almonds. Or the frozen French green beans. But I had already bought almost $400 worth of groceries. Did I really need more?
I could probably make it to Bellingham and back, but I’d be racing. No time for a brew pub, or anywhere else. And I hate being late for my water taxi.
So I hit the signal and pulled into the exit for Bow Hill Road. I turned left and headed for the charming little Skagit Valley communities of Bow and Edison. A scenic route across the Samish Flats would lead me back toward Anacortes. At a leisurely pace.
Happy serendipity: One of the few structures composing the tiny burg of Bow was a tiny U.S. Post Office. I pulled in to the lot and interrupted the lone clerk who was vacuuming his itsy-bitsy lobby, seemingly surprised to get a visitor. I purchased a pane of fall-color stamps, which will help me encourage voters in Pennsylvania and North Carolina to go to the polls this election.
Along my pleasant drive across the valley, I stopped at a self-serve farmstand in Edison for a pint of fresh blueberries. I craned my head to try to count the number of fisher-folk wading in the Samish River, which must be having a big coho run. I stopped and hiked a mile on the Padilla Bay Shore Trail, from which I enjoyed expansive views of the Cascade foothills beneath multi-toned layers of soft September cloud. A lone heron was the only fisher here.
For me, this “Plan B” was so much better than racing about like a chicken with its head cut off, as my farm-raised mother used to say.
I paused at Seafarers Memorial Park in Anacortes for a few minutes of in-car shut-eye, then got my latest COVID vaccination and flu shot at the Safeway pharmacy, and made it to my boat with time to spare.
Home again, home again. Larder loaded. Sitting pretty, with autumn arriving.
Toasting Barbara from her memorial bench, looking toward Boundary Pass in the Salish Sea and Saturna, left, and Patos islands.
WHAT ELSE CAN I SAY? Barbara sends her love.
That’s the first thought that comes to mind after returning yesterday from my second annual pilgrimage to Sucia Island to visit the park bench memorializing my late wife, who died of breast cancer in 2021. In 2022, state parks workers erected the bench, commanding what might be the most beautiful saltwater view in the San Juans, with the help of a GoFundMe project to which many of you generous readers contributed.
Daughter Lillian accompanied me this time for a cozy overnight in sleeping bags aboard WeLike, my restored 1957 Skagit Express Cruiser, a dazzling study in mid-20th-century turquoise, snugly tied to a dock in Fossil Bay.
My 1957 Skagit Express Cruiser, WeLike.
We arrived on Labor Day afternoon, just as many other boaters were heading home from their holiday weekend. After a bone-jarring ride through tidal turbulence encircling Orcas Island and hazardous wakes from giant motor yachts hell-bent for their home ports, we were thankful to find plentiful dock space at Sucia, our favorite marine state park, the blissful destination of countless voyages over past decades aboard our sweet old sailboat, Sogni d’Oro.
For the easy moorage this visit, we thanked Barbara, whose ashes we scattered on the waters here two years ago. She makes things happen here, we’re sure of it.
Your correspondent at Barbara’s bench, with Shallow Bay in the background.
We immediately packed snacks and a surreptitious bottle of Barbara’s favorite sauvignon blanc, setting out for the mile hike through deeply shaded woods of cedar and autumn-gold maples to her bench at the south peninsula forming soporific Shallow Bay.
Barbara (Burns) Cantwell, 1955-2021
The bench sits high on a bank above some of Sucia’s characteristic shoreline of wildly sculpted sandstone, like something Antoni Gaudi might have fashioned had he won the commission rather than the Northwest winds and tides. From a seat on the bench, a swivel of the head takes in a stunning panorama including Orcas, Waldron, Stuart and Patos islands of the San Juans, and Canada’s Saturna and Pender islands.
After a day of low-scudding clouds that sprinkled raindrops along our way, Barbara now cleared the sky to match the blue of her eyes that had bewitched me from age 16. If the weather had been perfect from the start and seas smooth, we’d never have found room at the dock, Lillian and I professed. “Mum watches out for us,” we agreed.
On the park bench memorializing her mother, daughter Lillian reads aloud from one of Barbara’s favorite mystery authors.
Though the birds had largely spared it as a target, we gave the bench its annual swabbing with cedar-sage spray cleaner, a scrub brush and paper towels. The bronze plaque remained clearly legible: “For Barbara, who loved this island, from Brian, who always sat beside her.”
Perched comfortably, my daughter and I munched on apple slices dipped in peanut butter, sipped a tart and fresh New Zealand wine from colorful metal tumblers off the boat, and took turns reading aloud from one of Barbara’s favorite mystery authors, Elizabeth Peters. “The Last Camel Died at Noon” featured the adventures of Egyptologist Amelia Peabody and her professorial husband, Radcliffe Emerson.
Lillian at the stone gateway to the madrona forest on Sucia Island.
After hiking back on an alternate route through a marvelous madrona forest, we returned in the morning with a vacuum jug of coffee and a small campstove. Cloudy skies cleared to golden sunshine just as we arrived at the magic bench. Over the stove’s flame, we made toast that we smeared with ripe avocado. More Amelia readings. More quiet communing with our beloved wife and mother.
“I miss her,” I told Lillian. “I do, too,” responded our daughter, who turns 33 this month. “She knew how to make things perfect.”
A spare paper towel had to suffice for the Kleenex I forgot to pack.
Much has changed in our lives and continues to change. My ability to fall in love has sputtered back to life, with emotional twists and turns. Lillian and partner Chris are soon to move to Philadelphia, as he takes a new job as a flight attendant. Lillian, the baker, hopes to become Lillian, the book editor. Along the way, they will enjoy free flights all over the world.
But come what may, our love for Barbara will never change. We think of her often. And at least once a year, at least one of us will return to commune with her on her enchanted island.
Over the years, winter scenes like this gave me plenty to write about from Nuthatch Cabin. Next winter might be my last here.
THE PENDULUM SWINGS. It’s one of life’s absolutes. Things change, even on Center Island.
I started “Cantwell’s Reef” six years ago with the loosely defined purpose of writing about “ditching the office and making a life on a small island nobody’s heard of.”
The love of my life, Barbara, was my partner in that adventure. The bustling Seattle Times newsroom was the office I had fled. In countless blog posts, I told about learning our way as full-time Center Islanders, situating a cool old boat at the dock and a tough old pickup truck on neighboring Lopez Island. Month after month, my writing marked the turning of seasons, with the arrival of enchanting wildflowers, summer dog days, autumn harvest fairs and winter snows. It’s been a full life.
Now, I turn to my exit strategy.
Cancer took Barbara from me in 2021. The Times newsroom is but a distant memory to me, and in the wake of COVID many staffers work from home. To everything there is a season. Turn, turn, turning pages.
Since Barbara’s death, Galley Cat and I have toughed it out here on our own for three years, but it’s time to look for a new home with more social engagement.
That bell tolled in a way I couldn’t ignore when The Mad Birder and his spouse, my next-door neighbors who have become dear friends and frequent dinner hosts, announced recently that they were putting their cabin up for sale.
The MB just turned 70, and it seems that continuing health challenges and the march of time told him and his dear wife it was time to simplify life and solidify their base in Skagit County, where they have another home.
That seemed like a sign. It is time for me to think about moving on. I will hate to leave this beautiful place, this comfortable cabin, this friendly little island, and my perfect writing hut. But the time is coming.
I won’t move quickly. It will be at least a year before Nuthatch Cabin is ready to put on the market. That deck rebuild needs finishing, for one. An electrical circuit needs repair, the chimney needs replacing, the roof needs a good cleaning, etc. I have no idea where all the travel souvenirs and family mementos will go; I long ago vowed: No more storage units. If I want to flush money away, I own a toilet.
There are challenges, of the type faced by many of my peers in the 65-and-older crowd.
If I sell the house I live in now, which just fits in my retirement budget, will I be able to afford replacement housing anywhere nearby?
I’ve heard the same quandary from friends. Home prices in Western Washington — and pretty much anywhere down the West Coast — are crazy high. And nobody I know wants to move to Arkansas or Oklahoma or pretty much anywhere that’s considered affordable. Most are red states. No thank you.
Because of Barbara’s illness, I retired early, meaning my retirement savings and Social Security income took a hit. The silver lining is that I qualify for housing programs aimed at the low- and middle-income populace.
In choosing a new locale, I have a growing wish list, beyond basic political compatibility. I’m hoping for good parks and trails and maybe a hiking club. A pleasant and walkable downtown with a good coffeehouse or two. I’d like to be near water so I can keep and enjoy my great little boat. I’d like the option of satisfying part-time work as well as volunteer opportunities. Good healthcare. A lively arts scene.
A place where I already have friends would be a big plus.
With the help of friends, I’ve started looking. Daniel and Jean Farber some months ago launched a campaign to get me back to their hometown of Olympia, where I shared a 1970s college-days house with Daniel and fellow students of The Evergreen State College. The latest development: They offered and I accepted a six-week housesitting gig late this fall while they spend quality time with a new grandson in California.
Galley Cat explores the rocky knoll behind the Nuthatch.
The Oly time will help me decide if that’s where I want to live again, with plenty of time to look at the local housing stock and living costs. Galley Cat will accompany me, which is great, though I’m sure she’ll miss roaming the island woods.
No sooner did I announce my Olympia plan than friends on San Juan Island countered with a strategy to keep me in the islands. (It’s nice to be wanted.)
Barbara Marrett and Bill Watson educated me about various affordable-housing projects in and around Friday Harbor. When I visited them recently, Barbara generously drove me around town to inspect every one of those housing developments, including one cluster that consisted of charming old homes that had been lifted from their original sites and barged to Friday Harbor from Victoria, B.C. The San Juan Community Home Trust keeps homes affordable, in part, by selling the house only. Buyers than lease the homesite from the trust at a low monthly rate. There are many such tools to create alternatives to traditional market pricing.
Homes barged from Victoria, B.C., are among affordable housing offered in Friday Harbor. San Juan Community Home Trust photo
When I had lunch with a new friend on Lopez last week, he told me that Lopez, too, has an affordable-housing project worth a look. While Olympia has its allures, I would love to stay in the San Juans.
So that’s Chapter 1 in the Great Center Island Exit Strategy. More ideas are welcome, shoot me a note. I’ll keep you posted, my friends.
Ivory flowers of Oceanspray brighten the June woods on Center Island in the San Juans.
HAPPY SUMMER SOLSTICE on this glorious island day with a perfect 72-degrees Fahrenheit, klieg-lit skies of royal blue and not a single pesky cloud between here and Hurricane Ridge. I hope you’re sharing such dreamy weather.
If the weather gods haven’t convinced you already, the meteorologists will tell you that summer officially began this afternoon at 1:50 p.m. PDT.
Mr. Fix-It. The deck progresses.
The past week on this remote little island nobody’s heard of has been a welcome and peaceful lull between the holiday crowds of Memorial Day and July Fourth, and a welcome diversion from the weird and weirder news of the world. (If you’re a praying person, pray for democracy.) It’s also been a time for me to relax into my summer chores. I’ve planted my deck garden, whacked the weeds on my rocky knoll and replaced more planks in my years-long deck-replacement project. (It’s a bit like painting the Golden Gate Bridge; once done at one end, I’ll start over at the other.)
The wildflowers that gauge the advance of our springtime have mostly come and gone. But June is the season for Oceanspray, the shrub bearing thousands of tiny ivory flowers that in combination give the plant its name, adding a dreamy, creamy sort of surf effect to our sea of evergreens and maples.
George and me at Kapalua Bay, Maui.
For me, the beautiful week on my island is a double dessert in this month’s feast of life. I just returned from a week on Maui with my travel buddy, George, who lives in Seattle. From a comfortable condo in Kihei, we had adventures in snorkeling, beachcombing, trekking ancient lava flows at wild La Perouse Bay, food-truck dining, and luxuriantly lolling around a palm-shaded swimming pool that featured its own cool little waterfall. Even got a tan. It’s good to have a new companion who enjoys travel and adventure as much as I do.
Meanwhile, Galley Cat enjoyed a week’s vacation hosted by Auntie Julie and dog Nigel in their comfortable home in the garden spot known as Brier. Galley and I honor them.
This season makes up a lot for those January days of whistling 50-mph winds and freezing pipes in the San Juans, let me just say. My best wishes to you for good companionship, memorable family fun, idyllic outdoor dining, silly yard games, lazy beach bumming, energetic boat rowing and more this fine summer.
Despite cool temperatures, wild roses are blooming this Memorial Day in the San Juan Islands.
IT WOULD BE A LOVELY DAY if this were March, I suggested with a smile to fellow islanders as we passed each other on morning walks around our little rock this morning.
But it’s Memorial Day weekend, and I was kitted out in raincoat, Pendleton hat and woolly gloves. It was cold. It was wet. It’s supposed to be late May, for goodness sakes.
The up side: My island, which was already getting crunchy underfoot from a dry spring, is no longer crunchy. We’ve had two much-needed long, soaking rains in the past week. My only worry is that I might have to repeat my usual once-a-year weed whacking, completed last week on the Cantwell little-half-acre.
This Sunday morning rain-washed air as fresh as a tightly furled rosebud lured me outside, and I saw many rosebuds on my walk. Yes, it’s bloom time for the Nootka rose, one of our colorful native plants in the San Juans. The Sea Blush and blue Camas have pretty much come and gone, but for now we have the wild pink roses, and in June we’ll see the creamy, filigree blossoms of Ocean spray.
As I walked, I also met and welcomed our new caretakers, Steve and Nancy, as they circled the island in their red pickup. They are temporary summertime replacements for Rich and Maria, who recently were wooed away by a community association on nearby Blakely Island. Rich, a former state parks ranger, and Maria, a retired school librarian, were wonderful overseers of our island for several years.
Steve and Nancy, who hail from Lake Tahoe, California, these days, have been frequent visitors to friends who have a place on Center Island, so they are well familiar with this little rock. Steve is a retired police chief from the California State University system, and Nancy spent 33 years as an educator in public schools. A teacher and a cop should do OK keeping things in order around here, I expect. But they didn’t seem like disciplinarians, they seemed very friendly.
They will stay through the summer, giving our homeowners association a few more months to find permanent replacements to live in the little blue house next to our clubhouse.
Best wishes for the rest of your Memorial Day weekend, with appreciative thoughts of all the friends and loved ones who’ve come and gone.
Nuthatch Cabin’s old-school, hard-wired communications center: When the wire gets cut, we’re screwed.
OMG, MY INTERNET WAS DOWN FOR A WEEK. Need I say more?
It’s true that many of us spent much of our lifetimes communicating on phones that weren’t any smarter than Bevis or Butthead, and we survived. But that was then.
These days, especially if you live on a remote little rock, home Wi-Fi is what keeps you in touch with the rest of the planet, the World Wide Web that keeps us island spiders fed — with news, with social interaction, with Wordle and the Sunday Crossword, with televised entertainment that streams as easily as the tidal current in Rosario Strait.
Until the Wi-Fi goes dark, as it did about 10 days ago.
As removed from population centers as my Nuthatch Cabin may be, it is served with most of what we call the “mod cons.” Potable water fills the sink when I turn a faucet handle. The toilet flushes. Buried power lines set lights ablaze. Other underground wires bring land-line phone service and, yes, DSL Internet, courtesy of CenturyLink, the Louisiana-based telecom.
Through some convoluted happenstance of old-school technology from the 1990s, never before have my land-line phone and the Internet gone dead at the same time. When it happened this time, I knit my brows.
Already after regular office hours that Thursday, a cell-phone call to CenturyLink led me to a text exchange that I strongly suspect was conducted by an AI entity at the other end. There were too many formulaic responses. Whomever was helping me, I’ll call them “the entity.”
The entity first tried to set a repair appointment a week in the future. It ignored my protests that I depended on my Wi-Fi for keeping linked in so many ways to the outside world. That continued until our text exchange was winding up and I was asked if my problem had been addressed satisfactorily.
“No, the week wait isn’t acceptable,” I texted.
And suddenly the entity found it possible to schedule an appointment for the next day. I explained that I lived on an island with challenging access and offered suggestions for how a repair tech could get here. “I’ll add that to the report,” the entity told me.
All good, it seemed. The problem was that I sat at home all the next day waiting to hear from a repair tech, who was supposed to arrive before 5 p.m. At 4 p.m., CenturyLink texted me that its technician had visited me but was unable to gain needed access to the inside of the premises. Patently false; I hadn’t left home all day. Nobody had showed up.
I got on the phone to a live human being this time. From the accents encountered in several calls, I’m guessing the call center was in India, or maybe Sri Lanka. Bangladesh? Understanding their patois was a challenge. My only comfort was that I could have been trying to wade through a Louisiana drawl thick as gumbo.
Surprise, they now told me, 24 hours after my first report: The problem had been identified as an area outage, affecting more than just my residence. No, they couldn’t say how wide an area was affected. They had no idea when it might be fixed.
That was late Friday, May 10. The call center was closing for the weekend. I would wait, vaguely hoping someone was working on Center Island’s outage. And over the weekend I would watch old DVDs instead of streaming the latest from Netflix. I would walk across my island to check my email at the clubhouse, which is served by Elon Musk’s satellite-based Starlink Internet. (As much as I’ve tried to ‘X’-out Musk from my life, I ruled out switching to Starlink only when I learned that not only would it cost me $25 more per month, but I would have to invest in $600 worth of equipment. And neighbors told me that tall firs on our side of the island make for poor Starlink reception anyway.)
Monday morning I phoned South Asia again. Another new development: My area outage had been repaired, they now claimed. But my phone and Internet are still dead, I protested.
OK, we’ll set up a new repair visit, my customer-service rep said. For the end of the week. “For tomorrow,” I insisted. OK, for tomorrow. Not once did I hear an apology for Friday’s no-show.
Just out of curiosity, I phoned the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission consumer complaints office, which oversees telecoms. Legally, I could file a complaint two business days after a phone outage, a staffer told me. That meant the end of Monday. But CenturyLink had a poor record of quickly resolving complaints — it could take months — and the commission’s enforcement powers seemed weak.
Tuesday morning I finally heard from the repairman, a gentleman named Armando whose 360 area code indicated he was actually calling from this hemisphere. I told him I’d heard that several of my island neighbors had also lost their CenturyLink service. That was news to him. Mine was the only service request, he said.
He’d secured a plane ride that day to neighboring Decatur Island, which he would have to visit first. Apparently there’s some sort of switchbox on Decatur that controls service to Center Island.
Then he’d need a boat ride to Center Island. That was a problem. My boat was on its trailer, out of the water, and a fluke of the tides was such that water would not be high enough all week to use our launch ramp in daylight hours. I suggested he hire a water taxi. He was unenthusiastic.
I hung up, thought about it for a minute, and phoned a neighbor to ask a favor. His boat was at the dock, and the ride across the bay to Decatur was only 5 minutes. He agreed to help, so I called back to Armando, who said he’d probably be ready for a lift in 20 minutes. He would phone to let me know.
Two hours later, after more than one try, I got through to Armando again. Oh, it appears that all Center Island customers have lost their service, he told me. (Surprise.)
And here’s some irony. It happens that, as a result of the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, San Juan County-based Rock Island Communications won grants to expand fiber-optic broadband service to 1,000 island residents, including us folks on Center and Decatur islands. The digging of trenches and laying of cable had already begun on Decatur Island. And guess why CenturyLink’s old-school DSL service went out?
Yep, while laying lines, the forces of new-and-improved cut the old cable. Oops.
Armando told me he didn’t know where the cable was severed, but that the problem was clearly on Decatur. The good news: He didn’t need a boat ride. But he offered no optimism for a repair.
Bad, bad news, I thought. Why would CenturyLink now want to spend potentially big bucks to fix a broken line serving only a handful of customers on a little island nobody’s heard of? Admittedly, my neighbors and I will all likely abandon their antiquated service as soon as broadband switches on (at $10 less per month, with much faster uploads and downloads).
Commiserating with another Internet-less neighbor at our clubhouse, I learned that CenturyLink had scheduled him for a service call the next day, Wednesday. I wondered if that offered any hope.
I guess it did. Around 1 p.m. Wednesday, my long-silent land-line phone rang with a loud electronic burble. “It lives!” I shouted to Galley Cat as I ran to pick up the call. Leaping frantically from the cozy bed atop her kitty condo, Galley apparently didn’t share my thrill. (She’s always been a Luddite.)
Armando was calling from Decatur Island. The broken cable was repaired. Service was restored. It was unexpected good news.
On reflection, I realize that while Internet is nice to have, I could survive without it. Just as I did for more than half my life.
Meanwhile, I had re-watched a bunch of old “West Wing” episodes on DVD. I love Joe Biden, but God, I wish Jed Bartlet was on the ballot this year.
The rebuilt cart on the dock at Center Island: a key link in my island’s transportation network, ready for more seasons of service.
WHEN YOU LIVE ON A REMOTE ISLAND with no shops or garbage pick-up, all your groceries must be transported up a dock and all your trash gets packed the other way. You really come to appreciate a good dock cart.
Anybody who’s had a boat in a marina knows of what I speak: the boxy two-wheeled conveyances with tires the size of a small bicycle’s, usually pushed by a large, U-shaped metal handle. Often capable of carrying two Rubbermaid totes and maybe a Trader Joe frozen-food bag. They do their job handily. No big deal.
But when the cart comes in a large, economy size, carrying two additional totes and maybe a couple of 5-gallon gas cans as well, you fall in love. Such Cadillacs of conveyance halve your required treks up and down the dock ramp, which on a minus tide can almost require ropes and a belaying harness. If you’ve just arrived home from a Costco run, kitted out with a six-month supply of pasta and several half-gallon jars of Adams peanut butter, the unashamed among us dash off the water taxi, pass up the “normal”-size carts and nab the stretch-limo of grocery transport.
For years, Center Island’s “A” Dock has had such a cart. For years, it has been slowly falling to pieces.
The big cart was home-built long ago of thin plywood. Had the cart ever seen stain or paint, such protectants had long ago thrown in the towel against Northwest winters and retired to Arizona. The plywood’s raw, gray edges had started shredding like store-bought hash browns. On parts of the metal chassis, rust was holding the rust together. Our island’s caretaker kept up a brave campaign of replacing nuts and bolts, evidenced by shiny bits of metal among the oxidized. But as of late the cart’s front panel was falling out, threatening to dump into Read’s Bay one’s warehouse-store flagon of Mrs. Butterworth’s or body bag of Cap’n Crunch.
In places, rust was holding the rust together on the old dock cart.
For ease of reference here, we’ll call the big cart Otto (preferred pronouns: “It” and “Its”). Last fall, with winter looming, on a whim I asked Center Island caretaker Rich if I might tackle an Otto rebuild over the cold, long months ahead. It would be something to do, of benefit to me and all my neighbors. Rich enthusiastically nodded.
Then, you know how things go. I got busy. A bunch of holidays came along. Winter was shorter than usual, I’m certain of it. By April, Caretaker Rich had announced a pending move to another island, where pay was better and duties lighter. (These remote islands-nobody’s-heard-of can be cutthroat when it comes to poaching caretakers.)
Meanwhile, Otto was a wreck. Nuts were rusting to dust. L-braces once holding panels together twirled loosely as screws gave way. I felt bad I hadn’t fulfilled my aspiration and hated for Rich to depart thinking me a slacker. In late April, I queried him if I could take Otto out of service for a couple of weeks and proceed with the makeover. The nod was even quicker.
I wasn’t talking about a refresh. That elderly plywood needed full replacement. I hoped enough of the metal chassis would be reusable once sanded and given new coats of Rust-Oleum.
With gorgeous spring weather arriving, I loaded Otto into an island truck and transplanted it cross-island to the deck outside Nuthatch Cabin. Outfitted in my grubbiest old paint-splattered jeans and T-shirt, like a surgeon’s scrubs after 48 hours of brain surgery, I began the dissection.
With a can of WD-40 at my elbow, I twiddled and twisted, grunted and groaned. I removed a brimming jarful of old nuts, bolts and washers, which I set aside for triage as to possible reuse. Several bolts sheared off with a flick of my socket wrench. A saltwater environment does that.
The old plywood I set aside for a trip to the Lopez Island dump.
It was a 10-day project, involving three boat trips to the Lopez hardware store/lumberyard. The new plywood was $70. The dump bill, $15. The new nuts and bolts added up quickly, plus about eight cans of spray paint. Otto’s rusty u-shaped handle – already splinted in two places – was a write-off so I hopped on Amazon and ordered a new 1½-inch-diameter aluminum handle made by a manufacturer of industrial hand trucks.
Once Otto’s old metal frame was fully exposed, two corners looked like the work of rust-spewing moths – with more holes than solid surface. I fired up the Sawzall and excised those ends with a few moments of shrieking metal-saw demolition. With sharp edges sanded away, enough solid framing remained to support the cart. The axle and wheels were in good shape.
I painted the new wood in appetizing tones of green – “sage” and “oregano” – and tacked protective rubber edging to the plywood’s perimeter. Metal parts were sanded and sprayed with a rust-transforming undercoat topped by a rust-blocking Hunter-green enamel. To guard against theft, Caretaker Rich suggested I label the cart, which usually means scrawling it with the letters “CIA” (for Center Island Association). I chose to make it friendlier, daubing “Welcome to Center Island” on the end panel. Affixing our island’s name decreases the chance that Otto gets pirated to a neighboring port.
The last step was to install the hefty aluminum handle. Finally, without ceremony, last Friday I deposited the rebuilt cart at the head of A dock, ready for a new lifetime of grocery grunting and trash toting.
All seemed good. Then, Saturday afternoon, when neighbors joined me for a sun-drenched happy hour on the Nuthatch’s deck, I learned that another friend had a hair-raising mishap with the rebuilt cart. As he wheeled three heavy bags of trash down the steep dock ramp during an extreme low tide, the cart’s new handle worked free from its metal anchor loops. The loaded cart careened down the ramp.
Thank god, the ramp was clear. Nobody was hurt. Nothing ended up in the bay.
Another islander had subsequently reattached the handle to its anchor loops with metal screws, whereas I had relied on pressure from neoprene firmly packed inside the straps. The neoprene gave a solid seal with no wobble, fine for use on level ground but apparently not up to heavy loading on a precipitous ramp. Oops.
I tossed and turned that night, haunted by the fact that my good deed nearly ended in disaster. Finally, I set an alarm for early rising and resolved to inspect the cart first thing Sunday, with tools in hand.
By 7:30 I was in the island workshop adding two more anchor straps to the cart’s handle, satisfied that the unidentified Samaritan’s repair job looked good but convinced that overkill wasn’t bad in this case. While at it, I added half a dozen more bolts and an extra L-brace to reinforce the cart at every edge. Once bitten…
As the rebuilt cart has gotten more use, neighbors have voiced smiling appreciation. It’s the island way. Many pitch in to keep life chugging along on our little rock.
And saving extra trips up the dock with my Costco hauls will keep me smiling, too.
BONUS PHOTOS: It’s wildflower season on the rocky knoll behind Nuthatch Cabin. Blue Camas flowers, above. Below: A white inflorescence of Death Camas — toxic, but pretty — among the purple/pink of Sea Blush.
I enjoy coffee and toast with avocado and walnuts on the deck at Nuthatch Cabin, poised to take in an avian aria or two.
DO YOU EVER GET JADED BY BEAUTY YOU SEE EVERY DAY? In the Louvre of your mind, do you walk listlessly past Mona Lisa’s winsome smile? In your inner Florence, do you yawn at David’s washboard stomach? On a pristine spring morning in Seattle, does snowy Rainier not merit an “Oh, look, the Mountain is out!”
I had approached that enervating ennui on my little island of perfection. Daily routines had dulled senses and blinded my eye. But a pleasant phone chat with my brother Doug reminded me of his practice whenever he visits. He starts every day with coffee out on my deck to hear the dawn chorus. His example inspired me this morning.
If you’re not my neighbor the Mad Birder or one of his fellow travelers, you might not know: “Dawn Chorus” is the bird-lover’s label for the cacophonous birdsong that erupts with the sun’s rise in these warming months. It comprises the collective theme songs of scores of early birds determined to get their worms.
A nice thing about my island is we have so many birds that the chorus continues well into mid-morning, meaning I could catch today’s performance even after getting my required eight hours.
With no neighbors at home — the Mad Birder and his lovely wife are off on a madcap fishing trip in Nevada — I wasn’t shy about wrapping up in my bathrobe and slippers as I headed out to the Adirondack chair. In my hands was a breakfast of avocado toast and fresh drip coffee. It was 44 degrees F. outside. I was glad I’d pulled on long johns and that the coffee was blazing hot. Behind me, the sun was just rising over my rocky knoll to light up the treetops around me.
Sure enough, the birdies were belting out songs like Julie Andrews romping an edelweiss-laden Alp.
One virtuoso song, full of joyful trilling and punctuated by rising and falling scales broadcast at perfect pitch, turned my head and prompted a smile from my toast-munched mouth.
I regret that I’m not skilled at identifying many birds by their song, though I am often curious. My eyes scanned the treetops, finally spying a light-colored bird high at the tiptop of a dead fir, 100 feet up where the rising April sun was just warming the chill air.
He was too distant to identify by sight, but I relished the song, imagining the view from high up, and almost feeling the golden glow on my face as I lifted my eyes to the cloudless azure sky. I was the only human hearing his song, but I didn’t own it; the thrill belonged to this island and these woods.
Who was this bird of lilting forest melody? I couldn’t resist. I rose from my deck chair and tiptoed quickly inside, as if the bird would somehow hear me from that dizzying height. I returned with my binoculars. But the singer was gone, like a golden dream barely remembered after waking.
The entertainment wasn’t over, however. Countless songbirds zoomed and swooped in seeming games of tag among the fir limbs and maple catkins. Minutes later the singing bird returned to its perch. My high-powered lenses showed a Purple Finch (my best effort at identification), his rose-tinted head colored scarlet by the klieg-light sun. Besides the birdsong, calm and silence filled my woods but for the faintest background static, almost subliminal, of a passenger jet writing a contrail in the blue heavens. Some 30,000 feet up, its ear-budded transcontinental travelers knew nothing of this morning’s sweet aria from 100 feet above the forest duff.
With the bountifully-lunged singer in sight, I crept back inside for my camera with its 600-millimeter zoom. As I returned to my chair, a nearby nuthatch honked in merriment, taunting that the finch had again taken wing.
I kept watch, struggling for a photo of my elusive Pavarotti of the forest crown. He alighted atop another tree, but was brimming with springtime energy, resting only long enough for me to grab my camera, raise it to my eye, and … focus on an empty branch. Finally, after many tries, I caught a photo.
After many tries, my long-lens camera caught this lustily warbling songbird high atop a fir on a bluebird-sky Center Island morning.
Back atop the dead fir, another finch joined the first. Falling from the perch together they defied gravity, fluttering up, down and sideways like frenetic tiger swallowtails. The start of a hot date? Or two males in a chest-thumping challenge for territory? “Want me to scram? Who’s gonna make me? You and your mother?”
Their struggle against Earth’s pull reminded me of the classic aviator’s poem, “High Flight” (which, Wikipedia tells me, U.S. Air Force Academy students must memorize):
“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence…”
It was a good start to another day on this small island nobody’s heard of.
A Calypso Orchid, aka Fairy Slipper, opens like a peacock’s tail among the forest duff behind Nuthatch Cabin.
A MILD WINTER MEANS EARLY WILDFLOWERS in my beautiful San Juan Islands. Easter weekend brought the first blooms on my back-40 of a perennial favorite, Calypso Orchid, also known (because of its tiny size) as Fairy Slipper.
The fairies that visit Center Island seem a careless lot, leaving more and more of their delicate magenta slippers behind every spring.
Visiting friend George and your humble scribe, on James Island
The Oregon grape and buttercups are blooming, too, on my rocky knoll. And when a visiting friend, George Moua, and I hopped aboard WeLike and buzzed over for a sack lunch and hike on delightful James Island on Saturday, I was amazed to see a Giant White Fawn Lily in bloom alongside a trail. Usually these starburst-shaped flowers wait until May to add a splash of delight to our forest understory. Another hiker had seen blooming blue Camas, another surprise at this early date. George, a Seattleite who shares my love of the outdoors, was lucky to encounter such early treats on this, his first visit to the San Juans.
Coming soon: The diatom-sized pink flowers of Sea Blush will roll like an ocean wave across the curvaceous landscape of my knoll, accented by ivory florescence of Death Camas (there’s a fun name), royal blue Camas and more white Fawn Lilies. It’s Center Island’s own grand floral parade. Time to get the lawn chairs ready.
Cantwell's Reef 