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.
My project for last week: refinishing the lightboards from my sailboat. Beyond the deck rail blooms the creamy flowers of oceanspray, a shrub native to Northwest woods.
SUMMER ARRIVES this week, the season when islanders like me try to blend the virtues of the ant and the grasshopper.
The Aesop’s Fable, you might recall, tells of the ants who spent their summer busily storing up food for the winter while their grasshopper neighbor spent all summer making music on his fiddle. By season’s end the grasshopper had good memories, and no doubt had polished up some catchy tunes, but faced a hungry winter ahead. When he asked for a handout, the ants told him to bugger off and go dance the winter away.
Therein lies the problem with old Aesop: His righteous protagonists can be mean-spirited bastards. But I digress.
Arriving at a happy medium in the ant-vs.-grasshopper industriousness quotient is my goal on Center Island. I also strive not to be as snotty as the ants.
Saturday, we had an island work party that hit just the right notes. I and 15 or so of my neighbors worked from 9 to noon on projects to preserve and prettify our community assets. I helped to scrape and repaint the railing on our upper dock, while some weed-whacked the boat yard and others did carpentry repairs on the clubhouse.
After three hours, we all gathered on the clubhouse deck for grilled brats and shared some island camaraderie and a pony keg of good IPA from Anacortes Brewery. Ants and grasshoppers. Too bad nobody brought a fiddle.
There’s lots to do around Nuthatch cabin this time of year. I continue to rebuild my deck a few planks at a time, with Lopez Island lumber-yard cedar ferried here on WeLike, 64-board-feet at a time. I try to restain one side of the cabin every summer. There’s lots of firewood to be split. And this summer I’m also doing projects related to my sailboat, Sogni d’Oro, in preparation for its sale.
Sogni d’Oro moored off Puget Sound’s Blake Island, July 2018.
Yes, an era is ending, as daughter Lillian and I have decided it’s time to find someone new to love the dear old Westsail 32, which has been ours since 1989. We have a prospective buyer, one of Lillian’s close friends in Seattle, someone who fits our hopes for a new steward who will give the boat care, energy, love and fresh adventures. I’ve promised a few restoration efforts first, and the sale depends on a satisfactory inspection, but hopes are high.
On Center Island, my summer routine has kicked in. I rise around 7 or 8, with coffee and a breakfast of avocado toast topped with walnuts. Once I’m dressed and more or less cleaned up (one doesn’t really need to shower unless you have visitors, right?) I often go for a bike ride (three brisk one-mile, through-the-woods laps of a route encircling our airfield), then devote a half-hour to a New York Times crossword before getting busy with some project for the day.
Foxgloves are June bloomers on Center Island.
This past week that involved stripping the spoiled old varnish and refinishing the sailboat’s teak lightboards — beautiful craft pieces my father built 30 years ago to hold the boat’s big, vintage zinc-alloy running lights. I cut the wires, detached the boards from the boat’s shrouds and brought them to my island for refinishing. Two days with a heat gun and a sander, then two coats of a heavy-duty waterproofing wood finish. I’ve ordered cutout birchwood lettering from a manufacturer in Idaho to match the Westsail’s sail emblem (a stylized capital W, with 32), which I’ll epoxy to the lightboards as my father did. He made the original cutouts by hand, bless him.
The refinishing project was a lot of work, but satisfying. And doing the work outside on my deck in the June sunshine, with wild foxgloves and oceanspray blooming nearby and twittering birds complementing the Jimmy Buffett tunes on my bluetooth speaker, wasn’t too painful. Galley Cat wandered by every few minutes to meow a hello and roll luxuriantly on the sun-warmed cedar deck.
The healthy 2023 kale crop in the Nuthatch’s rail-mounted planter.
That’s the antsy part of my day. The grasshopper kicks in around 5 when Galley and I indulge in what my daughter calls a “snooze read” (bedding down with a favorite book until one’s eyes close) up in the loft for a half-hour. Then it’s time for me to cook up a good dinner (tilapia tacos, say; maybe a stir-fry with fresh kale from my deck-rail planter) while cranking up more tunes and sipping a glass of good New Zealand sauvignon blanc from my monthly Costco run. The best offerings on Netflix often finish off the evening. (Even small islands nobody’s heard of get the internet these days. In fact, fiber-optic broadband is coming, we’re told. Yikes.)
That’s it. A day in the life of this antsy grasshopper on Center Island in the San Juans. Come 7:57 a.m. (PDT) Wednesday, happy summer solstice to my Northern hemisphere readers. Don’t forget your warm-weather chores. But remember to fiddle now and then, too. Maybe even dance.
The almost-finished product, awaiting new lettering to match the Westsail’s mainsail emblem. The red light goes on the boat’s port side, green on starboard.
Cantwell's Reef 