High Tide at the Edge of the Ghost Forest

On Sunday, did went west. It was gray here in town all day apparently, but by golly there was sun at the ocean. It began opening up at Lake Crescent, and just kept getting better.

Lake Crescent, Olympic National Park, December 30, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

Eagle at the Lake (Click for larger image.)

Pretty much all I wanted to do was to sit on the beach and read, but it was high tide. No beach. I found a log to sit on that seemed likely to be above sneaker-wave range, and watched the occasional extra-high waves wash salt water right into the forest edge among the ghost trees for a whole hour after the high-tide time marked on the tide tables.

Rialto Beach, Olympic National Park, December 30, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

Where I was sitting I could see to the north, and my body shaded the book. Almost right away I fell into it— Louise Erdrich's The Round House, wow— and would be gone away; and when I'd come back each time, there it was, the sunny ocean, the sound of the waves:

... (Click for larger image.)

The closest a wave came, it only caught my attention because I was taking a picture of two hikers as they came along the beach, and it washed them up to their thighs. I did a quick assessment: do I need to grab my stuff and scramble further back? No. But just in case I was wrong, I picked up the book and held it above my head.

That wave is probably the one that got them... (Click for larger image.)

There were a few eagles in the day, one in the tree on the point along Lake Crescent (where one often is); another at a turn in the shore along the Quileute River (ditto), one along the highway somewhere past Bear Creek. Not much of gulls, or ravens, or little flitty birds in the woods, or sea ducks.

To look south I'd have to be squinting into the sun, so I didn't, hardly at all.

James Island, Rialto Beach (Click for larger image.)

The web doesn't yet have a way to grant @vcmcguire what she wants, "Wish I could get a few deep breaths of salty Pacific air." But probably Cee is willing to share her soundscape, which might gratify a different sense:

Soundscape for Cee (Click for larger image.)

Thank you, Olympic National Park.

**TOTALLY BOOKSTORE**

Went to Portland for the monthly medical adventure. The big west coast storms had discouraged any AngelFlight pilots from signing up for my mission, so I flew down via Kenmore Air and Alaska Air. (AngelFlight, determined to take care of me anyway, arranged for the AlaskaAir flight to be free. Thank you to AngelFlight and to Alaska Air.) Had a nice sunbreak for the flight out of Port Angeles...

December 2, 2012. Heading East Over Port Angeles Harbor (Click for larger image.)

The Olympics Peeked Out As We Flew By (Click for larger image.)

Not Many Passengers, So Kenmore Flew Us In a Piper Chieftain. (Click for larger image.)

This trip was all about urban delights. There I was in Portland, riding on the MAX (the light rail), and on the streetcar, arriving early enough in the evening to look around me. There are tall buildings and Powell's City of Books, and light rail and streetcars and buses, and restaurants and density, and people on bicycles zipping along the rainy dark streets with blinky lights on their helmets; brick buildings and pedestrians everywhere even on a rainy Sunday night. At the motel by the PSU campus, skyscraper out the window, sound of the MAX train's bell. I held my umbrella over a Portland State student at the streetcar stop; she was watching its expected arrival time at our stop via an app on her phone. Other stops have proper shelters and digital readouts, tick tick, the next car will arrive in 4 minutes, 3 minutes...

Motel Window at Dusk, 5th and Montgomery, Portland. Church of St. Michael the Archangel (Click for larger image.)

Motel Window at Dusk. The Portland Plaza and the Wells Fargo Center (Click for larger image.)

I got to Powell's after a quick supper in a noodle shop. Being there for the first time, wow, I was so excited I could hardly breathe. I mean, it wasn't just-a-bookstore-so-who-cares (which is what I expected and why I hadn't bothered to make it to Powell's on the previous eight medical visits to Portland) but TOTALLY BOOKSTORE, pulsing with energy the way midtown Manhattan does if you just stand there on the street. It was full of people buying armloads and even whole shopping baskets of books. It had shelves and shelves of Loeb Classical Library. No pix, I was too dumbstruck to fire up the camera. I had to close my eyes and leave altogether when I got to the natural history section. The store was so intoxicating I was about to forget that I am a lifelong public library user and only buy books sometimes, as much as possible buying via Port Book and News to help keep them in business...

All the time I was wandering through Powell's, I was thinking of a poem by Miriam Sagan (my co-editor in the once-was Santa Fe Poetry Broadside).

Miriam Sagan:
"Library", from Inadvertent Altar:
            Standing in the stacks of Widener Library
            For the first time, I could have found
            The Federalist Papers in Urdu
            If I'd looked hard enough
            Narrow space between the shelves, beneath a catwalk
            Scholars walked over my head, or graduate
            Students hugging tight cold Cambridge streets
            Avoiding deportation to some terrible regime back home.

            Level A, B, C
            Translucent floors are other ceilings
            Down at the bottom, books
            In languages obscure by the time
            Alexandria burned
            What Scythians spoke, or Assyrians
            Down here, I'm seized
            Not by a desire for knowledge
            But by desire
            Surrounded by the smell of paper
            Pages curling upward, I want to make love
            To anyone, myself, some old boyfriend
            Or current one
            For I'm alone.

            I told this story
            Twenty-five years later
            To a Buddhist scholar, who said:
            "Oh yes, that's bodhichitta,
            The thought of enlightenment."
            A nexus point
            In a diamond web.
            I'd always thought
            Bodhichitta was the smell
            Of the incense stick
            At the funeral
            Some wake up to impermanence
            Not this lovely sensation
            Of too much to read.

I've lived so long in smaller places (by choice) that I forget really what a city is, what it does, how it feels. It was great sparky fun. In the morning: streetcar to the medical center, appointment, then streetcar to light rail to airport to home.

This post is for CF and AO, with whom I have been talking about 'urban'; and for IJ, who claims, "I am immune, immune I say to any blandishment offered up in any book store. But just on the tiniest off chance that I don't know myself all that well, I don't darken the doors of the places. Well, not very often, anyway." And of course for the Other Miriam.

Logship at the T-pier

Arrived: Pacific Logger, looking overdue for some maintenance. But she's here to load logs.

Might try to get some pictures of the peeler yard in action...

August 25, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Right now am reading a book about the invention of the shipping container (The box : how the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger). Wouldn't mind seeing a fully loaded container ship this close up; also wouldn't mind reading a book about the log trade.

Three Nights in Northeast Nowhere (Roadtrip, Part 2)

Cedarville, California, July 31-August 3, 2011 (Click for larger image.)The Warner Mountains (Click for larger image.)

SA was my first boss at Santa Fe Public Library, back 26 or so years ago. ("My claim to fame is that I hired her," she told the librarian at the village library when she introduced us.) Now she's an online bookseller in distant Cedarville, California, elevation 4,300 feet, population 514; the internet and the Post Office are the poles of her work life. I slept in her book room. (They call it 'the sun room', which it was before being walled in for books.)

Views of the guest room... (Click for larger image.)

We hung around, and ran errands, looked out the windows at the fields and the fruit trees and the dry mountains, and went into town every day, and talked books and libraries and the book biz and computers and all. Each evening she checked her email for orders, and ran around the shelves locating what the patrons requested; and every morning she packed books and we'd go in town to mail them. We spent a lot of time watching the cats; and the deer, who came in bunches, with many spotted fawns (MC calls them 'The Bambis'), to feast on the clover patch and the fruit trees.

A Bambi (Click for larger image.)
Surprise Valley & Warner Mountains. Still bits of snow on Eagle Peak. This year the field next door is in grain, previous two summers in alfalfa. (Click for larger image.)

Getting out of the house with nonstop talking going on, and both host and guest's patterns disrupted by the visiting process, is somewhere between comic and tragic at our age. Forgotten wallets, forgotten baskets of books to mail, where is my whatever, oh god now I can't find this other thing. Happened both with SA, and later on in the week with VMW. Oh it's mortifying.

On Monday we drove over the mountains to Alturas, so I could meet SA's friend SM, whom I have known now for many years via our blogs and via email, and had never met. It was awkward for barely a moment, then we talked like the familiar friends we actually are.

On Tuesday the big event of the day was Senior Lunch at the Senior Center. SA is part of the crew who sets up and serves and cleans up. I met everybody, and ate (was directed to the table for the younger seniors, not the table for the older seniors),and listened to what people talked about, and won beaucoup admiration points for washing dishes—the molded plastic trays, the steam tray pans the food comes in (it is prepared at the community clinic), and so on. The pinochle game regulars settled in while we cleaned up. We went on about our errands. We delivered a couple of Gary Snyder books to someone who might be interested in buying them; he kept them to look at, later phoned to say he wanted to buy them. We visited the library and the weaving shop and the store, and mailed books and drove the handful of streets among the little houses.

Frontier has given up trying to fix the pay phone. (Click for larger image.)

Everywhere we went, everyone greeted each other by name. I missed a chance to take a photo of a kid on horseback right at the 4-corner intersection. I mailed @lagina two blurry postcards of local views, and my sister a postcard of the twice-a-year cattle-drive through town, when cowpersons on horseback move the herds from summer pasture up in the Warner Mountains to wherever the winter pasture leases are (didn't quite understand that part). SA had me take her portrait in front of the post office, as I had done 10 years ago when I visited.

It was a long wet winter and cool spring. Relative to being up there in the high desert, everything was very green. "The hotel is for sale," I said. "Is it open?" "It's open. It's always for sale."

Hotel. Library. (Click for larger image.)

On Wednesday morning after coffee and talking and a slow start, set off down the highway to Nevada City, for further visiting.

Reading News

I have lately realized that though my tagline on twitter and on my homepage itself is 'Librarian, reader, watcher of ships, denizen of beaches', here I mostly only address the latter two pieces of that description of my life. And nowhere address my present relationship to my life as a Buddhist monk, except in the context of journeying to Crestone Mountain Zen Center now and then.

Here anyway is my reading life at the moment. The widget being live, even when this post is no longer current, it will show what I'm reading at the moment you look at it.

Meanwhile I am contemplating what to do about my dusty cobwebby web pages about the Cerro Gordo Temple in Santa Fe, and whether I should construct a blog post here about the continuing struggle to restore my smallest oryoki bowl from the accident which befell it in November two years ago, while I was on my way home from Crestone from an occasion for which I needn't have brought the oryoki at all— no formal meals— but a proper monk always travels with her robes and bowls, now doesn't she...

Oh, By the Way

News from the local paper about the log export market: Logs destined for China stacking up on Port Angeles waterfront. Roughly the same story, from a couple of months ago, that the supply of logs arriving has overwhelmed China's ability to unload the ships. I have intermittently spent a lot of search time failing to find out how they get the logs off the ships, especially out of the holds. I might just have to go down to the harbor and find someone to ask.

Meanwhile, I clicked on the the other Timaru Star by accident, the ship which I have been ignoring all this while—

because the one in our harbor that went to Astoria then Coos Bay then stopped transmitting was Timaru Star (HK)—

Timaru Star, evening, June 27, 2011. No activity. (Click for larger image.)

Timaru Star (BM) was here this week and I happened not to go down to the harbor but she was right here, and she is now in Bellingham. Huh? Also a cargo ship. Cue the Twilight Zone music. Deedledeedle deedledeedle.

Ships to China are everywhere. I'm reading Susan Freinkel's Plastic: A Toxic Love Story and learned that from the west coast, at least, most plastic waste bound for recycling plants is sorted, washed, shredded and goes by ship to China, where it is turned into this and that which might be useful (carpet? polyester clothing?), but not back into soda or water bottles. I knew our recycling went by truck to a sort facility in Tacoma, but apparently from there to China. Who knew?

PS. She says, also, "for every pound of trash put out at the curb, another seventy pounds is generated in the manufacture and production of their source materials." Nice to have a number, and a source. I have such a hard time explaining to people why I haven't bought beverages in single-serving containers for 15 months, not even when I'd sell my soul for a CocaCola. No soda machine to use to fill my reusable bevvy cup = no coke for me. That's 730 aluminum cans per year not produced on my behalf, and I haven't lapsed once.

Invisible Feast Drifting Along

A day with a lot of critters in it. Seals, a little porpoise dude coursing by, invisible fish, pelicans cormorants gulls.

Rialto Beach, Quiet Ocean, Quiet Surf, July 10, 2011 (Click for larger image.)Looking Towards James Island (Click for larger image.)

There was a school of fish out there somewhere under the water. Gulls, cormorants, pelicans and seals were all working just offshore, the show moving slowly north as the invisible feast drifted along. Failed to get pictures of pelicans, but there were a few; any day with pelicans in it is a good day.

Quiet Soundscape on a Bright Warm Overcast Day, July 10, 2011

This was a COASST survey day. When I got back to the start point after the second beach segment, I settled on a bank of gravel against a log to listen to the waves, sift pebbles with my fingers, and read for an hour or so. Bharati Mukherjee, Miss New India. I am SO into it. Stopped again on the road home, at the pullout next to the Sol Duc River (around Milepost 210), to read some more.

Someone With a Really Interesting Mind Made these Cobble Henges... (Click for larger image.)  

Usually after mentioning that I was out on a COASST survey, there is nothing more to say about that because I rarely find anything. This day there were indeed dead things. What appears to be the sea lion from last month is now far to the south along the jetty beach. Much deteriorated, in fact no head so I didn't try to measure it or fill out a marine mammal report sheet. The (cartilaginous) skeleton of a skate. And by golly a beached bird carcass to record for science, the first on the Rialto Jetty beach segment since November of 2009. A northern fulmar. I measured and recorded and identified, the proper citizen scientist (though God knows I'm often wrong). Didn't glove up, a mistake; got my hands well imbued with the curious musty odor of the Procellariiformes. And decay. Disinfected twice, washed, disinfected, washed, and could still smell it. Must have been on my clothes.

Northern Fulmar, bird #772, Rialto Jetty Beach segment, July 10, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Signs, Signals, and Webcams

I went and asked at the Olympic National Park visitor center here in town about when the Obstruction Point Road might open. A volunteer docent said her husband had hiked to the end of the road this week, and had needed an ice axe to keep his footing getting across the iced-over drifts in the road in some places. She guessed mid-August. A ranger guy guessed late August. No houseguests are getting onto the Lillian Ridge Trail in the near future...

The road conditions recording says there are 44" of snow at the snow stake, wherever that is; somewhere on the north side of the hill above the Hurricane Ridge visitor center, perhaps the nubbin in the background on the northcam,

Hurricane Ridge Web Cam, Parking Lot View (Click for larger image.)

the view of the parking lot on Hurricane Ridge. There are almost always deer in the cam view that looks southwest towards Mt. Olympus. Are people feeding them, or is there just more fresh grass on this slope than elsewhere in the vicinity? There are those 44" of snow nearby to factor in...

Hurricane Ridge Web Cam, Looking Towards the Bailey Range and Mount Olympus (Click for larger image.)

Enough with the addictive-behavior reading orgy. I really am heading for the outer coast this morning.

La Push Web Cams (1)(2), Right Now (Click for larger image.)

Friday the Duck Was At the Heritage Center

(Staying local, apparently.)

It's Duck Derby season, an annual fundraiser for the local hospital. The ridiculous beast appeared across the street from the post office in front of the Elwha Klallam Heritage Center on Friday, but then wasn't there anymore. No worries. Now he's at Safeway. I'm thinking I might actually buy a number this year. (I don't think you actually get a rubber duckie. Your numbered duckie gets dropped in the canal on the morning of the derby, and bobs along where he will, preferably across the finish line.)

Giant Duck Balloon (Click for larger image.)

In the lot with the trees there's a big shrubby plant with coppery leaves and spectacular pink flowers. C. says it's a flowering quince— therefore definite evidence (along with the nearby daffodil) of a former garden on the lot.

Flowering Quince Chaenomeles japonica in the Lot With the Trees (Click for larger image.)

I went down to Ediz Hook. There was a lot of ship action. Most interesting and baffling, the Evergreen freighter that came out of Puget Sound just to drop off its pilot before heading straight into Canadian waters, curving back east en route to Vancouver. Not clear what else they could have done (no pilot station at Port Townsend, though I thought there was), but the track sure looks peculiar on a map.

Ever Urban (note the pilot boat off the stern) (Click for larger image.)Her Track (Click for larger image.)

There were two tankers and a freighter in the harbor on Friday afternoon, and today there's a log ship, Kiwi Trader, loading at the T-pier; I might go out later and try to get a picture of her.

I'm actually apparently devoting the weekend to reading, mostly mowing through library books which are either almost due or have many other library patrons waiting for them, or both. I was so into Postmistress, Mora, Wash., 1914-1915 : journal entries and photographs of Fannie Taylor that I dreamed about her: there I was at Mora, lacing up my boots to hike to Second Beach, well within Fannie's territory. We were talking a little about what freedoms women have today (not much freer than the life Fannie led!), and I knew I was dreaming and was so grateful to meet her. I think I'll write to Jacilee Wray, the editor, and ask if I can see some of the originals of Fannie Taylor's photographs. The Park has them in their archives.

Woolly Pups and Sunshine

(Letter to a friend:) Last night was the Perspectives program at National Park headquarters about 'Status of the Translocated Sea Otter Population in Washington'; presented by Steven Jeffries, who's been with WDFW for 31 years, he said. He also said,

The impossibly cute little otters are called woolly pups. 'They look like ewoks.' They lose that brown woolly look after a while, and they grow HUGE. A large male can weigh 100 pounds. There's about 1200 of them off the outer coast of the Peninsula now. They're all descended from 30 who were translocated here from Alaska in 1970, and released at La Push. (57 were moved, 30 survived the translocation.)(They had to be moved somewhere, by the way; at that time there was underground nuclear testing going on near their island in the Aleutians.)

They move around in big rafts, and they eat a lot. Urchins are their favorite food. At one point a raft of 80 or so sea otters shifted into the Strait and completely wiped out a huge colony of red sea urchins between Slip Point and Pillar Point. Then left. Presently an enormous bunch hanging out at Destruction Island, where Jeffries guesses they are finding lots of Dungeness crabs to eat. They also like razor clams.

They're very vulnerable to oil. They don't have blubber, and depend on their thick fur for warmth and waterproofing. Even a small spot of oil can be like a hole through which their body heat leaks, and they can die of hypothermia.

According to the Peninsula Daily News this morning, the Coast Guard overflight yesterday saw no signs of a slick from the fishing boat that went down on Thursday. But the article also quotes the resource protection specialist for the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, who says, approximately, it was so windy and the swell so high you couldn't have seen a slick if it was there...

I'll survey my beaches on Friday, to look for oiled birds. If there's a slick and it stays offshore, the sea otters are safe; but birds can encounter the oil out at sea, and can turn up as much as 60 miles from where they get oiled. Right now the weather is gorgeous, rain again on Friday and over the weekend. This is such a consistent pattern I'm starting to think it's a message from the universe to give up my college job since there is only ever sunshine on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. "Don't take it personally," says my reference colleague, DK.

How shall I not. It looked like this today: harbor, Ediz Hook, Strait, Victoria across the water. The ship is Alaskan Legend

If You've Got It, Flaunt It: The View Through the College Library's Windows (Click for larger image.)

I'm reading Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point. His epigraph, from E. B. White: "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the word. That makes it hard to plan the day."

Late to Work Again

Readin' the current book by Jack Nisbet, the guy who wrote the book about David Thompson mapping the upper reaches of the Columbia that I had so much fun with a few months ago. This one is set in the late 1820s and is about the plant collector David Douglas. Douglas-fir douglas-squirrel douglasia etc Douglas.

Should be blogging Monday's beach walk, or else mopping floors--sand ALL OVER the house, yo-- but am sitting here reading twitter and tending my sundry reading-greed lists.

Frost so thick this morning it's like science fiction. No it didn't rain or snow, all that endless thick white just froze right out of the air...

COASST survey, January 17, 2011, Hobuck Beach (map) (Click for larger image.)

Pelicans Being Emitted By the Sky

There was rain in town, drifting clouds caught in the trees around Lake Crescent. But at the ocean, a bubble of sunshine. Sunlight and pelicans. Neap tides: it went to low and began coming back, without a whole lot of visual difference.

Rialto Beach, October 3, 2010. Cake Rock in first image, Dahdayla below. (Click for larger image.)

All afternoon, any time I cared to put the book down, there were little specks out there. Point the binoculars at them. Oh yes, those are pelicans. More; those are pelicans too. One or two or a line of 14. Pelicans pelicans pelicans. It became a game. No pelicans for a moment? Oh yes there they suddenly are, being emitted by the sky somewhere to the north or south of Cake Rock, like matter being quietly created in Fred Hoyle's steady-state universe.

Pelicans Flying In Across Rialto Jetty, October 3, 2010 (Click for larger image.)