Building a resistant community, one island friend at a time

A February squall brings surf in to Orcas Island’s Crescent Beach. A squall of political resistance might come to these islands as well.

IN THESE CHAOTIC POLITICAL TIMES, change is to be expected. It looks like the change for me on my little island means, ironically, no change. For now.

Following November’s presidential election, I announced that I would relocate to Olympia to become an activist in support of the United States Constitution in a power-center of Blue America.

That was then. Now, with the red-hatted D.C. wrecking crew carelessly trashing our federal government with shocking speed, and with their brazen talk about gutting Social Security, Medicare and other social programs upon which retirees like me depend, I can’t see my way to relocate.

I’m not inclined to move to low-rent Arkansas or Mississippi. And as long as I stay in the high-rent Pacific Northwest of my birth, any move would mean more costs. If the economy remained as robust as it was under Joe Biden, I might have made that work. But with the new guard on a bender to destroy the world’s faith in the United States, our promises and our dollar, I suspect they will trigger the second Great Depression before all is said and done. I’m putting my head down, sheltering in place and hoping to ride it out on my remote island.

I may be down, but I’m not out. My new mantra: Support my local community — my island and all of the San Juans — like never before. We all must stick together to weather the political storm of our lifetime.

I’ve started preaching that gospel. On a just-completed five-day visit with friends in Friday Harbor and on Orcas Island, I chatted it up with people I met along the way. Simply talking to strangers and newly minted friends about the national tensions we face together and the need to unite in our own towns formed an immediate bond. Such bonds can help build stronger communities, with citizens who can stand up to this attack on the traditional American values of equality, democracy and the rule of law. I’m sure of it.

As federal support vanishes, supporting local arts can be an important part of community bonding. I had a happy taste of that in Friday Harbor when I accompanied my chum Barbara Marrett and two of her friends to a performance of the play “Art” at San Juan Community Theatre. The San Juan Islands Museum of Art, the production’s co-sponsor, hosted an after-theater reception with wine and platters of fresh Westcott Bay oysters.

San Juan Island artist Aimee Dieterle’s acrylic painting of Mount Rainier is part of the current exhibition, concluding this weekend, at San Juan Islands Museum of Art.

The director and actors from the play were at the reception to answer questions, and those in attendance got a free viewing of the museum’s current exhibition of the works of more than 100 San Juan Islands artists. One of my favorites was a wall-mounted sculpture of an octopus, its suckers represented by the caps of real acorns, with outer skin constructed of thousands of tiny seed leaflets from Douglas fir cones. The unique media lent an unmatchable texture and natural color to an artwork representative of the rich vein of local talent.

At the art museum, as I made new island friends, I talked up the need for community unity. I felt like a socio-political Johnny Appleseed, sowing resistance one person at a time. The next day, about 75 islanders gathered outside the Friday Harbor Courthouse to join in the national “Not My Presidents Day” protest. I’d have joined in, but didn’t hear about it in time. Maybe we’ll all find each other eventually!

My new whim didn’t end there. On Orcas Island, my friend Tom Willard and I scrapped our Tuesday plans to lunch at a fancy restaurant in Eastsound. In the spirit of community-boosting, we instead went to the Orcas Island Community Foundation’s weekly free lunch, cooked and served by volunteers in the basement of Orcas Island Community Church.

The recently renovated and reopened Olga Store, a project of dedicated Orcas Island residents, is an example of what a strong community can accomplish.

Just revived after a COVID-related hiatus, the community lunch on Orcas has long been promoted as open to all, not just for senior citizens or the needy. A Facebook promo describes it as “an opportunity to build connections and nurture the feeling of community and belonging.” Perfect for these times. We ate hearty split-pea soup, salad and the best whole-grain crusty bread I’ve chewed in a long time. At a shared table, we made a lovely new friend, Sadie, who agreed that we all need to stick together. Simply lunching with other islanders of every ilk in a church hall felt like an act of resistance and unity. A year ago I’d have gone to that fancy restaurant. Maybe I can volunteer to cook and serve next time.

When the time comes for a Twenty-Million-Person March on Washington, D.C., I’ll get my plane ticket. Until then, I’m taking small steps, working on local connections.

Life, death, COVID and recovery among the wonders of winter

A gray squirrel pauses after raiding the Nuthatch’s bird feeder on a snowy February morning.

LAST NIGHT AS I WATCHED NETFLIX between frequent refueling of my cabin’s woodstove on a frozen February eve, outside the Nuthatch’s dark windows new snow came unbeknownst to me. It arrived secretly and silently, as if on little cat feet.

OK, apologies to Carl Sandburg. But I did get a poetic surprise when I peered out of the sliding door at bedtime and discovered the pristine new blanket of white seamlessly spread like a puffy down comforter across my deck.

FOG

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Carl Sandburg

No flakes were falling then. They had come while I wasn’t looking, anointing my island with a fresh and lovely purity.

This is the peaceful time of a San Juan Islands winter. No raging winds, no worries of losing lights and firing up generators.

This morning I relished the view from my loft. Having trundled back to bed with a gripping Michael Connelly novel, fragrantly fresh-ground coffee, and toast satisfyingly smeared with avocado, I watched through my front wall of windows as sunshine first lit the tall firs’ white-frosted branches.

Ahhhh.

I have a certain license to be lazy, and it’s kind of nice. On a phone consult yesterday, my Seattle hematologist told me it could be six months before my hemoglobin levels return to normal after a bleeding ulcer sapped my energies at Christmas. It means I’m anemic. So I’m giving myself permission to take it kind of easy. To devote myself to eating and sleeping well. Gradually building up my exercise routine.

I’m dedicated to all that once again after a drastic diversion last week. My dear Aunt Jeanne McLean, my mother’s youngest sibling and the last survivor of that family’s five children, died at age 96. I made the pilgrimage to South Dakota for her funeral.

I debated whether I was strong enough to travel, but my family had always been close to my aunt and her family. As a teen I had invested paper-route money in a Greyhound ticket from Seattle to visit the Dakota relatives on my own. I wanted to go now. I needed to go.

My brother Doug, who would also attend the funeral, made it easy for me. His partner, Lori, whose career tasks included travel arrangements for a globe-trotting employer, suggested I hop a direct flight on Alaska Airlines from Seattle to Denver. Doug would drive from their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to meet me and we would have a brotherly 400-mile road trip from Denver to Rapid City in his new Outback, sharing hotel rooms along the way.

Your scribe with cousin Tami McLean Bishop of Rozet, Wyo.

Smiling weather gods gave us a week of sunshine, the funeral service was nicely done, and reconnecting with cousins from across the West was soul-nourishing.

I moved more slowly through airports than is my norm, but I managed fine. And my brother and I saw a whole lot of scenery, from the snow-frosted Colorado Rockies, to the wide, wide wilds of Wyoming, to South Dakota’s beautiful Black Hills.

At 80 mph on U.S. 85, my brother Doug and I traversed hundreds of miles of snow-frosted, wide-open Wyoming.

I returned to the Nuthatch last Saturday just ahead of the snow, and I’m happy to hunker down here again. I’ve returned to what amounts to a Center Island COVID epidemic, affecting at least eight of my neighbors, some 50 percent of our winter population. So I’m being more of a hermit than usual.

That’s OK, Galley Cat is keeping me company. I hope my fellow islanders feel better soon. I plan on staying warm. I plan on staying well. Wishing the same for you.

My Aunt Jeanne McLean was buried at Black Hills National Cemetery, S.D., in the same plot occupied since 2006 by her late husband, Calvin McLean, a Korean War vet.

Relieved to be home on my rock after Brian’s Dreadful December

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.

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.

The social butterfly of autumn

Your loyal correspondent tops out on a 700-foot+ dune in Great Sand Dunes National Park in southern Colorado. North America’s tallest dunes build from windblown grains of sand at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, seen in the background. Photo by Douglas Cantwell.

ISLAND LIFE CAN BE LONELY AT TIMES, you’ve heard me say. With Center Island’s year-round population hovering around 20, the social life has its limitations.

But, boy, loneliness hasn’t been an issue for me this fall.

So far, my autumn has been a dizzying — and delightful — whirlwind of visits by family and old friends, along with travel to visit family and friends in locales ranging from Orcas Island to Moscow, Idaho, to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Hilary, Christi and me on Center Island. I love visitors, and I’ve had a few good visits lately.

It began with my Labor Day outing to Sucia Island with daughter Lillian, closely followed by a visit here by Hilary Hilscher and Christi Norman, two longtime friends. I first got to know them through their association with Audubon Washington, for which they drove all over the state together in a sort of “Thelma and Louise Go Birding” partnership about 20 years ago to create the Great Washington State Birding Trail. Laid out in a set of seven detailed and beautifully illustrated maps, the Birding Trail comprises the state’s best bird-watching sites. As outdoors editor for The Seattle Times, I piggybacked on their great work with a regular newsfeature called “Birders’ Top Spots,” spotlighting sites from their maps. (Six of the seven maps, published between 2002 and 2011, are still available to order online here for $4.95 apiece).

Hilary and Christi, who both live with their husbands in the greater Puget Sound area, have been regular readers of “Cantwell’s Reef” and decided they wanted to see my little rock. We ate lots of good food, drank good wine, and enjoyed renewing our friendships.

The same can be said of a visit shortly thereafter by Ken and Kate Brinkley of Portland. I first met Ken on an impromptu shared sailing afternoon out of Orcas Island’s Rosario resort in the 1980s. He became a lifelong friend. Ditto with Kate when she married him.

Ken, Kate and yours truly among Center Island madronas.

Not long after the Brinkleys departed in late September I left my island for a marathon day’s drive across the state to visit a new friend, R.J. (for Robert James). He lives in Moscow, Idaho, just across the state line from Washington State University, where he manages a library. I guess I’m partial to librarians. I met him online, which is a good way to make friends when you live on a small island nobody’s heard of. We’ve become chums.

Sandwiched in there somewhere was a visit with another friend discovered online, Tom, on Orcas Island. My boat, WeLike, got me there. It’s nice to find local buddies, too.

Doing the Idaho road trip in one day each direction was exhausting but also a treat. It had been a while since I’d seen so much of my home state, from the San Juans to Seattle, over the Cascades, to a bit of Coulee Country before navigating the rolling and roiling Palouse. I renewed acquaintance with phenomenal State Route 26, which slices straight as a razor across much of its 114 miles of Eastern Washington as it blazes a path toward Pullman.

Farmers had just completed the wheat harvest. The bright yellow-white stubble glowed in the sunshine as I crossed into Whitman County, where welcome signs boast that it grows more wheat than any other county in America. (In 2015, growers there harvested nearly 30.5 million bushels, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.)

Less than a week after my return to Center Island I again caught the Island Express water taxi. I was bound for the Seattle airport, where I hopped an Alaska 737 for Albuquerque, via a layover in Phoenix (where I was glad I didn’t need to step outside into the 108-degree October heat). New Mexico was more clement, with daytime highs in the 70s and low 80s.

My brother Doug met me and drove us the hour to Santa Fe and the lovely adobe home he shares with partner Lori, whom I enjoyed meeting for the first time.

My brother Doug Cantwell at our Great Sand Dunes National Park campsite in Colorado, about three hours from his Santa Fe home.

The next day I acclimated with a pleasant hike with Doug on the outskirts of his town at 1.3 miles of elevation (blowing a raspberry at your Mile-High City claim, Denver). A day later we aimed Doug’s shiny new Outback at southern Colorado for a three-night campout at stunning Great Sand Dunes National Park. I’d never heard of the place, which became a national park at the end of the Clinton administration, but I won’t soon forget it. North America’s highest dunes pile up against the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, dominated by 13,297-foot Mount Herard, of which we had a front-row view from our campsite that Doug had hand-picked from a prior stay.

Autumn colors are spectacular among Colorado’s aspens, willows and cottonwoods.

Piñon Flats Campground was named for the scrubby pines that this year were groaning with cones bearing the famed pine nuts that are so good on salads and in sauces. For two geezers whose combined ages approach 140, there was one advantage to having to rise from our cozy sleeping bags in what’s aptly called the “wee hours”: With a combination of dry air, little light pollution, and high elevation, Great Sand Dunes is certified as an International Dark Sky Park. “Wow” and “whoa” dominated our midnight vocabulary as we encountered Orion, the Pleiades, and a bright, night-piercing Jupiter, high in the eastern sky. Doug spotted more than one shooting star.

Though I puffed from the 8,800-foot elevation (I live just above sea level, remember), Doug and I made it to the top of a 700-foot+ dune, often slipping and sliding in the sand that dominant winds bring from afar. During my visit, warm sunshine brought out the startling gold of the area’s aspens and willows. An afternoon thunderstorm swirled towering black clouds around the mountain tops. And, after a half-day drive to the top of 10,856-foot Wolf Creek Pass on the Continental Divide, we experienced a wind-blown snow shower.

This past Saturday, before Doug and Lori dropped me at Albuquerque International Sunport (rivaling in airport-marketing silliness the “Sky Harbor” of Phoenix), we witnessed the final hour of a mass ascension, part of the final 2024 weekend of Albuquerque’s famed Balloon Fiesta. The colorful event draws some 600 hot-air balloons each year.

Frank Boy, a sort of young Frankenstein balloon, came from Brazil for Albuquerque’s 2024 Balloon Fiesta.

I’m back at the Nuthatch today, catching my breath. Over the next two weeks I plan to buckle down and write more get-out-the-vote letters for Vote Forward, which expects to contact 10 million voters before November 5. Ten days ago I mailed 140 letters to Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. Doug will be busy in coming days, too, having committed to 200 letters. There’s still time if you want to join us with your pen.

All the socializing and travel has been great, truly. But sometimes I love my quiet island. A good place to write.

Influencing the future from my little island in the San Juans

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.

Rites of island autumn include loading the larder

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.

A pilgrimage to Barbara’s enchanted isle

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.

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.

Seeking a Center Island exit strategy

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.

Summer is an island of bliss in a stormy year

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.

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.

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.