Ocean in View Post #980

This post is actually being written by RF, who is in Port Angeles visiting Miriam for several days. Life's vicissitudes are unfortunately leading not only to the waning of the blog but to the necessity for Miriam to leave this spectacularly lush and beautiful part of the world to return to one associated with beauty of a very different and far more austere kind for the remainder of her days.

I for one have enjoyed reading the posts from afar, and feel that the blog deserves some kind of ceremony in honor of its cessation. Finding out that this post is the 980th to be published makes me want to try to figure out some way to squeeze out another 20, so that it can celebrate post #1000, but I don't think that it's going to happen. Speaking on behalf of Miriam, I would like to thank everyone who has read or commented over the years. I also want to encourage anyone reading this to remember to keep your eyes open to the wonders of both the natural and human-constructed worlds, and to help others share in the sensations to be had.

If there is no post #981, take care. If there is a post #981, we'll see you then.

After Long Silence

It's the camera's fault. It insists on not being unloaded. No pix = nothing happened. Also no record, no memory, no way to date events. Have I been to Portland twice or three times since last post? Did I get to the ocean? Who am I anyway?

Lucy Lippard says in Time and Time Again, "Photography has become essential in narrating personal experience." No pix = no narrative.

I have nothing to say really until after tomorrow's scans in Portland, and then probably not here. This is not a cancer blog, it's the beach-bunny blog, the joy-of-living-in-paradise blog; and that I don't have in my life any more.

Soundtrack: 'Have I stayed too long at the fair?' And... 'And wasn't it a long way down, wasn't it a strange way down?'

Thx to Lori Marx-Rubiner @regrounding for moving me this morning to say SOMETHING.

Any Day With Pelicans in It

August 26th, 2013. Pelicans on the move, Rialto Beach. (Click for larger image.)

Except for necessary emails re medical and family business, twitter is the only place I can talk these days, and that not very much. But I'm still here. VR has assigned me to go get three photos of the ocean. Luckily she is Canadian, and they call all salt water 'ocean'. Watch for pix from Ediz Hook and Salt Creek. Don't expect words.

Silt On My Boots

Here is an aerial photograph of the Elwha River flowing into the Strait, on August 21. Thank you to photographer Tom Roorda and to Coastal Watershed Institute for continuing to capture and share this record of ongoing change...

Elwha River, August 21, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

Found this draft post hanging around in blogger. Why not share? Was out there two days later with GF and SF. All the sandbars were covered with gulls.

MetaPost

Instead of a working memory, I have the following: all the saved email, inbound and outbound; all the digital photos, thousands of them, stored in chronological order; and this blog. But alas, keeping up here has turned into a continually-postponed item on the to-do list. Once again am attempting to bring the record up to date, without creating too much confusion of chronology.

Wading, on April 21, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

In the Marine Sanctuary office they are offering me writing assignments in place of the occasional (boring) volunteer work I do for them in their Endnote 'library', because they remember some of the blog posts of the past. Like my friends, they haven't noticed that I'm not doing it much any more. I need to find a polite way to say, Gawd no. Owing OCNMS a writing project would just add to the loo-o-o-o-ng list of communications arrearages which hang over my head as I lie on the couch reading whenever I am not at work.

Complete Confusion of Chronology

PG says I must mention that the posts about our vacation days did not appear here in order written, newest on top, but rather were intercalated below carrying the dates they happened. March 21 Shipwatching, March 22 Wings of a Black-Legged Kittiwake, March 23-25 Mostly Being Together With Friends (in Another Country).

Even I can't make sense of what I have done to chronology. It's all because blogs are upside down, yes? I will now complete the disorder with some headline no-longer-news about our last day. On 26 March we went out to the Outer Coast to look for Whales at First Beach. We saw elk on the way, yaay for charismatic megafauna, but no whales at First Beach. The light was flatter than flat, no decent photos. We ate our sandwiches while not seeing the whales, then drove around to Rialto for a little beach time. Beauty, flat light, in truth flat spirits as well. But we were there. As were the elk, still, on the drive home.

Those elk on Beaver Prairie, March 26, 2013 (Click for larger image.)A boat in the channel. Quileute River as seen from the point in La Push where we didn't see whales, March 26, 2013 (Click for larger image.) Rialto Beach in flat light, March 26, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

Shipwatching (Recollected)

Thursday, March 21. Spring break at the college began at 4 in the afternoon, and PG arrived from Santa Fe shortly afterwards. She requisitioned a nap, and then to go out on Ediz Hook. (I thought the nap was because she gotten a bit lost near SeaTac and near Poulsbo, and it was longer driving out here than expected. Turns out the nap was because she was on vacation and naps were an important part of her itinerary.) Tankers galore in the harbor, two Polars and two Alaskans. Conditions were not best for observing ship details out on the Strait, kind of misty out there to the north, but we managed to identify sundry ships, inbound and out, with the help of the iPad and marinetraffic.com. They had entertaining names, especially Grand Dahlia, and Glorious Maple. Okasana had such a baffling silhouette it took forever to figure out what we were seeing. What she was seeing, actually: PG's eyes and binoculars are much better than mine.

March 21, 2013. Looking south across Port Angeles Harbor to Klahane Ridge. (Click for larger image.) Only one pilot boat was visible. The other was... somewhere. (Click for larger image.) Look north across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. (Click for larger image.)

PS After much dithering about the question, have decided to date these posts about PG's visit on the days they happened, so they will file correctly; rather than the day written, as much as 10 days later.

If...

Sorry for the disruption. I think the IE display problem is cured.

After extended noodling in the dam cams' archive, found some rubble removal images. If this is how they are going to do it, wow, it is going to be slow. Surely they have to build a road down and remove directly into trucks...

Work on Glines Canyon Dam, September 17, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

Beware Strange Blog Behavior

Posts may be appearing and disappearing while I try to figure out what makes the sidebar stampede to the bottom of the page in Internet Explorer, but only in Internet Explorer.

The Watchers by the River

Driving west, there had seemed to be very darn little water in the Sol Duc River, and no fisher persons at the usual pull outs. So it seemed unlikely there would be salmon jumping at Salmon Cascades. But I had to go look, on my way home from the beach. Up the Sol Duc Road I went, through the beautiful forest, grey and dark; and yes, you could see watchers down by the river as you drove around the last curve, and the little parking area was full. Fish. We have fish.

Watchers at Salmon Cascades, October 2, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

These are the Sol Duc summer coho. They spawn a couple of river miles upstream. Sometimes a really big one would jump, and all the watchers would murmur or go "oooh". Sometimes one would jump a little to the right of the main flow, where you could see it wriggle and scramble up the thin water flowing down the rock instead of vanishing into the cascade; and the people would say "Go! Go! Go!", and clap their hands, and make pushing gestures in the air, adding their own intention to the fierce determined fishes.

No new photos of salmon in flight. If I concentrate on trying to get photos, I'm not watching any more, and once I have a good picture I think I am done and go home, instead of just being there. Here is where they were jumping:

Salmon Cascades, October 2, 2011 (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)

Two years ago I spent a long long time on several occasions trying to get pictures of the coho at Salmon Cascades. Though it violates the one rule of this blog, that all the pictures should be new, here are a movie and my best jumping salmon photo, both from 2009.

October 18, 2009. Perfect Flow, a Salmon MovieA Coho Salmon on October 18, 2009 (Click for larger image.)

Thinking About What I'm Doing, Kind Of

Jennifer Howard asked a question in her blog post, Doubting Digital Durability, and I found myself in a twitter conversation with her and with @RepoRat, Dorothea Salo. Kind of like conversing with the NetGods.

I wrote a comment for Jen's blog, and it won't post. Yaay technology. So here it is:

Scattered thoughts:

I lately bought a paperback published in 1953. It crumbled as I read it, though I was extremely careful, scarcely opened it far enough to read the lines of type.

But I also once held in hand a book published by Aldus' press in 1515. This was the year he died, so probably not literally an Aldine edition but rather the work of his successors. Still, the book was nearabouts 500 years old, and almost touching Aldus himself across time: my hands remember holding it, with reverence, not wanting to let it go.

Paper persists, as Walt Crawford said in 1998 ("Paper Persists: Why Physical Library Collections Still Matter." Online 22:1 (January/February 1998): 42-48.) The old link I had to the article itself has not persisted, but you probably can find it somewhere.

Mir S. and I did Santa Fe Poetry Broadside, a digital poetry magazine, from 1998 to 2009. When we stopped, we were certainly not of the same mind about what should become of it. To me, from the moment we started, Santa Fe Poetry Broadside was the entirety of what we had published, all at once. To my co-editor, it was an ephemeral publication by definition and by name, a Broadside; and the best of each poet's work would find its way to print; or not. To me, those poems we published are retroactively not-published if we allow them to evaporate.

It's archived in LOCKSS, but LOCKSS is a dark archive. The Santa Fe Poetry Broadside as we intended it vanishes utterly from the web if I miss one payment to my ISP. LOCKSS will migrate its data as technology changes, yes, and thank you so much, LOCKSS; nevertheless, if I want the Broadside to remain alive on the Web, the curation 'technique' is to pay forever.

@RepoRat thinks I could find another Repository to archive it. Then I'd only have to keep up payments for our domain name. Bottom line: it's a (very) Little Magazine, but unlike the ones on my bookshelves, it needs my will to persist.

I did care about the blogging I did for my former place of work. I was a library's voice behind the curtain for 30 months. It was work that wasn't quite mine, and I had to leave it behind. Almost 4 years on, they seem to be taking good care of it. As to this present blog, I really don't know what to think. It doesn't touch my professional work, but is the record of going on four years of my life. This will eventually matter to whom? exactly why?

We now return you to something like our regular programming. I might have something to say later today about the lot across the street, the one inhabited by trees (and trash). But first I need to think for a while about Libyan journalist Mohammad Nabbous, who was killed last night. #libya #libya #libya #japan #bahrain #yemen #libya

Yes Ships

This morning between outbursts of rain, the sky cleared up a bit, and a big tanker came cruising by the bottom of the street, very close in. Like maybe she would be coming into the harbor, that close in. Popped out on the deck for a picture, then to marinetraffic.com to look her up. Yes. Alaskan Explorer, destination Port Angeles.

Alaskan Explorer on the Strait, December 9, 2010 (Click for larger image.)

It was time to go to work. I just about kept pace with her easterly progress as I drove across town, so that she was just pulling around the end of the Hook when I parked; and when I got to my desk and then walked over to the college library's astonishing wall of windows, there was Explorer, just steaming by.

Alaskan Explorer coming into the harbor (Click for larger image.)

I worked until 8PM on Tuesday, and had my first experience of all that glass as a black curtain. Anything could be going on out there in the black night beyond the glass. The world might end out there and the building exist alone in infinite darkness. How would we know?

PS I think I've solved the iPad blogging problem. More investigation to be done, but the fifth attempt got me almost there: the trick will be to post the photos by email, then write directly in blogger.com. Emailed photos seem to behave the way I want. Yaay.

No Ships : a Meta-Post

Yesterday dawned rainy, but I had no fresh photos to put on the blog. I detoured down to the harbor on my way to work. There were no ships large or small anchored out in the harbor, no big ships at the terminal (W.C. Park Responder was there, as is often the case; when moored next to a freighter or tanker she is so small she doesn't even rate mention; but right then she sat among the idle cranes and miscellaneous work boats and was the only ship around). It was about 9AM, so the ferry was halfway to Victoria. Everything was quiet, and dim, and greyish. There were puddles everywhere. Momentarily it stopped raining and a hole opened in the clouds; a fuzzy-muzzy bit of rainbow touched down on Ediz Hook (map).

Ferry Not At Home, December 8, 2010 (Click for larger image.)

OK then. I have now spent literally hours trying to put up a successful blog post from the iPad. blogger.com is not a friend to a java-less environment. The Blogpress app produces unsatisfactory results as to where the photos are stored and how they behave. And if Blogpress could be easy to use for composition I haven't figured it out yet. Tried emailing a photo from iPad to twitpic, but ran into the java problem again in trying to get blogger to pull in the photo from there. I am not best pleased with the Gadget at the moment. Nor with Google, whose choice it is not to write an iPad-compatible app for its blogger.com users. I'll keep trying other avenues, but we are verging on the territory of This Is Really a Time-Sink Not Worthy of One's Energy In a Suffering World.

Long Ago and Far Away

One of the implicit ground rules of this blog is immediacy, but I need to tell/show something about the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. None of these photos bear on my here-and-now life, except to explain why I arrived at Ridgefield NWR on Saturday with expectations, and except that all weekend long I was remembering trips to the Bosque, and the friends I have been there with. Mentally composing emails to various of my beloveds as I drove: 'I took a road trip. You were on my mind.'

I think this is the population of greater sandhill cranes (subspecies Grus canadensis tabida) that breeds in Idaho, stages at Monte Vista NWR in Colorado, and winters on the Rio Grande. They don't travel very far, relative to their cousins that come down the coast, or the ones that stage in Nebraska. Photos from 2003, 2004, 2006, and unknown years like that.

Sandhill Cranes at Bosque del Apache, New Mexico, various years (Click for larger image.)

Just before sunrise on Flight Deck, December, 2006. Temperature about 5 degrees. Parts of the ponds were well-frozen, the birds walking around where they expected water, and skidding when they landed.

Watchers at Bosque del Apache, New Mexico (Click for larger image.)

There are also snow geese in (what feels like) Pleistocene plenitude, and by the numbers even more ducks. (Jeez. 80,000 ducks in the winter of 2005/2006. 55,000 geese some years. 15,000 cranes.) The Bosque is where PG taught me that ducks could be told apart, beginning I think with the altogether elegant Northern pintail (image)...

Snow Geese at Bosque del Apache, New Mexico (Click for larger image.)

OK, I think our cranes that come down the coastal arm of the Pacific Flyway are canadian sandhill cranes, Grus canadensis rowanii. Is the subspecies difference enough to explain why the Bosque cranes largely ignore people, feed in fields and yards all up and down the Rio Grande, while the Ridgefield cranes are so shy that visitors are not allowed anywhere near where they roost?

This post is for SP, who pointed out the flight of sandhill cranes over the Pacific Ocean when we were on Hobuck Beach on the Makah Rez. And for PG, RM, MS, SA, KB, IJ, LB, IR, GF, PB, RF, DG, MP, & UG, with whom I have watched at the Bosque on one trip or another; and for our neighbor JL who first told me about it, our second winter in New Mexico...

Note how those Mid-Continent Population cranes that breed so close to ours pass through Nebraska (up to half a milion of them) (Click for larger image.)

There Are Things To Tell

Bob Boardman's death has left me speechless here. How shall I be rollicking around paradise— the ocean the mountain the forest oh, Oh Wonderful To Have The Park As Our Back Yard Oh—

—when such a good man died.

There are stories with subsequent information, it's going to be in the news for a long time; but this one has the beautiful photo.

Meta

I just added tags to a lot of posts. My tag cloud did not visually reflect the relative importance of, say, pelicans or marmots in my life, or even my online life. So I fixed it. Sorry if this updating of old posts causes your RSS reader to burp.

Just In Case

Messing around with old posts again, shifting images into blogger which until now have been housed at my ISP. Just letting you know in case your RSS reader twitches when there are updates on old posts.

Meta-Post 2 : Into It Now

I just shifted the images in September, 2008, to blogger/blogspot, and deleted them from my ISP. I see why I hesitated for so long before making the shift in November , 2008. Blogger's notion of a large-size anchor image is 400 pixels wide, and I had been making mine 500 pixels wide. Liked it better that way. Having done September 2008, I've thought of a way to trick blogger, but it's twice as much work per image. We'll see.

While I was in there I lost my head and made tags (labels) for pelicans, Lillian Ridge, and marmots. Until I edit all the other posts with pelicans or marmots in them, it won't be very effective. Shall I also put the label 'birds' on every post in which I go out to Ediz Hook to look for ducks? Oh mercy, I'm not going to have to touch all 530 posts for one reason or another, am I?

I'm a lot smarter than I was a couple or three hours ago, but I think I'll stop for now...

Meta-Post

Over the next little while, will be making changes in old posts: mending tagging decisions, and experimenting with moving photos out of my ISP and into blogger. (Either a good idea or not: depending on which is likely to happen first, moving the blog to wordpress, or finally choosing a domain name and shifting ISPs at last. Odds are, both or neither.)

I mention this because your RSS reader is liable to 'read' a revised post as new, even if it's because I shifted JK's large photo files from our September 2008 day in the Hoh Rainforest out of storage I'm paying for and into blogger/picasa...

Also I thought I would mention that since mid-April I still have not caused the universe to produce a small container just to deliver me sodapop. Can't quite say I haven't caused any can use at all because the tomato juice I drank on the airplane was probably poured out of a can. Six weeks and counting. #730aluminumcansperyear #notproducedonmybehalf

Lastly, reading news confession. I've been tending the reading-greed list: ordering from ABE, suggesting library purchases, tracking forthcoming titles from now into the fall (OMG finally, there will be a new Nicholas Kilmer in November!). But I care enough about the good opinion of the folks at Port Book and News that I can't bring myself to drop off a list of mass market paperback mysteries for them to order for me. The ones I don't ask the library to get are lightweight. Punny titles or chicklit-ish covers, even. Am having to sternly remind myself of Betty Rosenberg's First Law of Reading: "Never apologize for your reading taste."

A Close-Run Thing

I don't QUITE just natter on about daily stuff either on the blog or on Twitter, but nearly. If I did, it might go like this (redacted) email to a friend:

I am finding it surprisingly constraining to have only Saturday-Sunday 'off' unless I steal a day from the tribe. Every Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday to the college, Monday-Friday to the tribe. The weather is gorgeous, and I'd go to the beach or something today, but I haven't been to the tribe for a week because Monday was a holiday.

Anyway this weekend must go do my beached birds survey Saturday, and Sunday have a date with MP to go to Second Beach. Bye bye weekend. Then Monday to the tribe.

On formerly flexible schedule, I'd not have done those two things on adjacent days. Even when I was on contract at Elwha I pretty much ran my schedule to my own comfort, a four-on three-off week for starters, plus I'd simply announce not being there when I wanted to. (All the money I saved the tribe by not working the budgeted hours I'd turn around and spend on materials while we still had that lovely grant money to spend.)

That was far better than _having_ to go to the college when expected; and feeling in arrears at Elwha on the other days.

I took all my paper bits to my tax lady in Sequim Wednesday. She called to say she has to come to town for auto service, and will bring it by. I think she wants to see where I am living because her opinion as a financial professional is that I should BUY a house. (As a lifelong socialist and communard in my heart, despite the surprising way I have found myself living at this certain age, being a property owner is not in it.)(Who-o-o-o would imagine? That's the sound of Tuli Kupferberg. Or were the fugs before your time, or outside your culture zone?)

Well, must get going. I left my jacket and scarf at the college yesterday afternoon because it was so hot in the library and I was so grumpy about it that I just grabbed all my tote bags and fled, never thought about the jacket. Will need it this weekend, so must go fetch before heading to Elwha. Go east to go west.

My beached bird mentor, M-S, is moving to a different job at NOAA. I'm in mourning.

Thick frost on the car. If I weren't leaving early, the sun would reach the car and melt it before I have to set forth. Thank god thank god for longer days.