Out on the deck in my flannel nightie, taking pictures. My attention zooms, the camera zooms. This is what I see, and show:
but it's barely ten degrees of the 360-degree horizon. 3% of the full circle. View below is zoomed back out to more like reality, about 50 degrees of the circle; there are bits of water over the roofs to east and west, though the only substantial bit is the one at the end of the street that I usually focus on.
This one is for Kate.
Morning. Blue but hazy day, sunshine and no fog, but thick thick moist air; you can't see Canada across the Strait.
The harbor, Ediz Hook, a freighter passing on the Strait just beyond the Hook, but still no Canada through the thick air.
Afternoon. The Strait. If you are determined to puzzle it out, you can see Victoria: the profile of Mount Douglas, and the buildings around the Inner Harbor, but fuzzy fuzzy.
And, out of chronology, what you can see when you can really see. Labor Day, a picnic way up on the hill in JL & JL's garden. Perfect weather. Port Angeles Harbor, Ediz Hook, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Victoria on Vancouver Island clearly visible (the next country north, across the Strait).
This post is for VR, who insisted I must go out and take pictures of salt water.
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...
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.
According to the photos in the camera, the following things happened since I last posted:
July 21, evening, SA arrived from Northeast Nowhere. She'd come to watch Canoe Journey land on the 23rd. We went straight from the airport out to Ediz Hook to watch the Sunday night flock of cruise ships pass. Setting the theme immediately: journeys, and water. Forgot to take pictures, but anyway you've already seen many pictures of cruise ships steaming past.
July 22 we did important local things like go to the Goodwill to get her some warmer clothes, go to the library and the post office, and eat at Toga's Soup House. All major adventures for someone from Northeast Nowhere. We went out to the tribal library to try to get a clue what time the canoes would leave Jamestown the next morning, what time the landing might begin, and spent a long time talking books and libraries with TH. I introduced SA to everyone as my first library boss, and the person who taught me what kind of librarian I wanted to be.
July 23rd, we had breakfast with JL at Smugglers' Landing, and then went down onto the beach to watch the canoes land. But word was that a canoe had overturned in heavy fog and 4-foot swells, and they had all returned to Jamestown. Arrival time entirely uncertain. So we went to the T-Pier to watch the logship Selinda begin loading, it had come in overnight. Back to the beach. It was a false rumor that the canoes had all turned back, only some had. The rest of the canoes began coming in. Five hours later it had gone on all afternoon and there were 30 of them. This will get its own blog post. (I hope. My impulse to communicate is still uncertain.)
VB and ML had arrived in town also on the 23rd. They came down to watch the canoes, heard how uncertain we were about what would happen when; so went up into the Olympics to Hurricane Hill (wildflowers!); then when I called them to say the canoes were coming in, hustled back down the mountain to watch.
July 24th, the four of us went out to Rialto Beach, so they could see a wild beach on the Outer Coast.
July 28/29: Portland again. Thankyou AngelFlight.
Right along, and especially the past two weeks, I've been spending a lot of time at the tribal library, and dropping in at the college library a bit though I don't work in summer quarter. My library peeps are my support system.
Also I spend a lot of time telephoning Florida, or procrastinating telephoning Florida. Family's woes continue. My cell phone is always in my pocket, and I always know what time it is there.
According to the photos in the camera, the following things happened in the three weeks since I last posted.
On June 14, I attended a field day at the west side of the mouth of the Elwha, where various little fishes were seined up, identified, measured, scanned for tiny embedded wire tags that say which hatchery they were born in, and let go again. There were lots of scientists, interns, and locals participating. The Peninsula Daily News had a very nice story about the day.
June 16, a deer hung around the neighborhood, performing such deer-ish tricks as eating all my landlady's beautiful new deep orange pansies, and parading down the middle of 8th Street grazing the yellow paint of the center line.
June 22, I went to Tukwila to a support group meeting for people with my kind of cancer.
June 25, LR texted the tribe's Education Director from out by the mouth of the Elwha on the tribe's side; there was a super-low tide, and she said we had to come out immediately, it's amazing. So we tumbled into the car and went. We were playing hooky from work in the education building, but when it was time to head back lest we miss Elder's Lunch (lasagna!!), I announced "I'm walking to Victoria!" and headed north toward the soft silty edge of the mudflats. LR and TH followed me out to as far as we could get. It was amazing.
June 25, picked WC up at the ferry, and June 26 we drove down to Portland for the bimonthly CT scans. I'm still stable, still in the clinical trial, still a science project. We did it as a day trip, left at 4:50 AM and made it home in time to put him on the 9:30 PM ferry.
June 28, the canoes were out of the storage shed and arrayed on the lawn between the Education Building and the Tribal Center. Canoe journey is less than a month away, there must be practicing and preparation and cold-water training and all for the pullers.
I never got to the ocean at all.
On the whole, every picture in the camera is as flat as my spirits these days. This is a beachbunny blog, supposed to be a mostly effortless, nearly chirpy picture of places gone and things seen. I don't much want to change the ground rules I set for myself and start posting lugubrious paragraphs about my state of mind. I also don't want it to be drudgery to post. Yet I don't want to lose three weeks at a time out of the record I have kept of my life since I decided to move up here, even if all I really want to do is read, not write. It's a puzzle.
Meanwhile, here is a picture showing the Elwha River's east and west shores and the shifting channels, taken by Mike McHenry of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe on June 11, 2013.
Sorry. The image template changed, and I don't have time to deal with it. Am packing to leave for Santa Fe and then Florida at impossible AM. It will just have to be what it is until I get home.
This post is for KL and RC, who were worrying about my silence.
Tom Roorda flew over the river again on May 28. As usual, thankyou to Mr. Roorda for permission to share his images.
Seeing it whole. Thankyou to Tom Roorda for permission to show these images, and to Anne Shaffer of the Coastal Watershed Institute for emailing them to me.
Saturday remained a watercraft day. Went out twice more, first time down to the harbor to check on the loading of Astoria Bay. There was more simultaneous activity than I've ever seen at one of the logships, two loaders taking logs off two trucks at a time, seven or eight trucks lined up at once waiting to drive out onto the pier. Brakes puffing, engines rumbling, each truck hitting its horn when it is in position and all brakes set, ready to have its load lifted away.
The whole process is mesmerizingly tangible, like watching a giant set of gears in some steampunk fantasy, and I love to watch it. The end result, of course, is that a couple of days later, a whole forest sails away to China.
Back home for a couple of hours, I kept my eye on the clock, and on the shiptracker websites, and when the evening's flock of cruise ships rounded Point Wilson, at Port Townsend, I went down to Ediz Hook (map) to wait for them to pass by on their way to Alaska. It is a reliable entertainment for summer weekend evenings; every Friday Saturday and Sunday, these ships bigger than all downtown leave Seattle at 4PM, come in close to the Hook around 7:30 PM, one two three, so the pilot boat can go out to pick up the pilots who brought the ships out of Puget Sound; and away they sail for Alaska. In a week they'll be back, and do it again. May through September, over and over.
But I was early, Westerdam, Jewel and Star were not yet in view, and there was a whole lot of action on the small boat docks inside the Hook. These were the guys whose boats were not sitting around in the alley a few hours ago. Mostly they hadn't caught anything. One man said his son had caught a small halibut. One after another they hauled up the ramp and headed for town.
I waited a while. Other shipwatchers came and went. There were two tankers and an empty log ship anchored inside the harbor. There were freighters and tankers on the move on the Strait.
It got blue out.
The pilot boat Juan de Fuca, pulled out from the pilot station
and ran around furiously out on the Strait. Took pilots off two outbound ships, a freighter and a tanker. Came back in, dropped off those guys, went out again. Put pilots on two inbound ships, a container ship and a tanker; then, finally, rendezvoused with Holland-America Westerdam, Norwegian Jewel, and Star Princess, one after the other, to bring in their pilots.
The water is a presence everywhere in Port Angeles, visible at the bottom of most streets. @jfleck's theorem does not require a waterfront home with moorage to be provable. Went walkabout around my neighborhood just now, taking pictures of the boats in yards and alleys and on the quiet streets. These would be (just some of) the boats that have NOT been trailered down to the water this weekend in really nice boating weather. In some cases appear not to have been anywhere for a good while.
The thing(s) to notice here: lilacs on the left. Strait of Juan de Fuca below. Freighter going past. San Juan Island on the other side.
Truth: the rhodies are mostly past their prime, and the madrona trees likewise; but the lilacs are splendid. In the vacant lots, alas, scotch broom is peaking.
LOTS more boats in the camera, and plenty visible as little specks out on the Strait. Must note however, that with slightly different framing this could have been a photo essay on the number of vehicles per household (trucks, boats, trailers, cars; functional and not), or the way people ornament their dooryards.
Where was all this? Thankyou satellites for talking to the GPS in my camera, and thankyou iPad for the location pin.
Shoutout to @jfleck , who writes about water and climate at the Albuquerque Journal, for this new-to-me visualizer, the WPC Quantitative Precipitation Forecasts. I really shouldn't complain, but it's relentlessly sunny here right now. My inclination is to cower indoors.
Journey North's Gray Whale section says it's "rush hour for moms and babies". Since I'm not going to get out to La Push at a low tide before I have to head for Florida again, that will have to do for whale news. For not-news, look again at the post about seeing a whale on April 21.
Work on the Elwha River's dam removal project is stopped for at least another month while the National Park and the contractors and the city and the tribe and other water users sort out the sad fact that the new water treatment plant and all its intake works were underdesigned and have been overwhelmed by silt and debris coming down the river from behind the former dams. It's more fun to think about the ever-changing re-making of the river itself and the nearshore. Once again Tom Roorda has been way up in the middle of the air looking at it, and sharing what he sees. New land continues to grow on the rez side of the river.
Did I mention the days are long?
Saturday
4 May 2013 Pacific Daylight Time
SUN
Begin civil twilight 5:15 a.m.
Sunrise 5:50 a.m.
Sunset 8:32 p.m.
End civil twilight 9:08 p.m.
It's starting to melt up on Hurricane Ridge, but there's still a lot of snow up there and on into the high country. Will the Obstruction Point Road open for July 4th weekend? Seems unlikely; last year it wasn't open until the middle of August. I stare at the lines on the graph and try to guess.
Went to Portland on April 29. The daylight is long, we did it as a day trip. Drive drive drive, lab work, consult clinical trial doctor, drive drive drive some more, back home again. I'm still stable, still in the trial. There was big news for a shipwatcher: Zidell Marine's current barge under construction, which I've been watching month by month from the windows of OHSU, seems to be finished. All fresh paint, and waiting down on the ramp leading into the Willamette River. It's now five days later, but either it hasn't launched yet, or the Portland news sites aren't reporting on her launch. She's not listed yet on the amazingly long list of barges Zidell Yards has built in its various incarnations, presently Zidell Marine.
Beached bird survey in Clallam Bay, COASST beach segments Slip Point and Middle Point. Friday, April 26. E. and I tagged along to keep JL company. There are just about never any dead birds on any of the Strait beaches: you drive out there, you walk the beach, you find nothing, you come back. Though in fact JL found a cormorant on the Slip Point beach earlier this year.
Westbound we took WA112 the whole way. There were elk by the highway.
We traipsed across the footbridge over the Clallam River, out on to the beach; and headed east towards Slip Point. You could see snow up on the hills on the Vancouver Island side of the Strait. (At Clallam Bay on the Washington side you are perhaps straight across from Jordan River along the West Coast Road on the Canadian side.)
JL mentioned we had just missed a 2-foot minus tide. There is supposed to be great tidepooling at Slip Point. Since it was a weekday and one of the best tides of the year, I was a bit surprised that the tidepool end of the beach was not aswarm with middle school students, waving checklists of invertebrates. But it was quiet. We had the beach to ourselves. At Slip Point just the old lightkeeper's house remains; the lighthouse itself and the boardwalk out to it are gone. This beach is really the community beach for the town of Clallam Bay. You are definitely not in the wilderness. The houses on Salt Air Street sit right behind the berm. :-)
JL had trouble getting me to turn around once we reached the outlying rocks of the tidepools. Just on the first bits of rock there were carpets of aggregating anemones, and limpets and chitons and barnacles, oh my. Sea urchins were calling to me further out on the point. I was sure they were there, we had seen broken sea urchin tests in the wrack. But this was JL's expedition. We had another beach to walk, and a lunch plan, and she needed to be home for dinner guests. No time for making my way out to the sea urchins' pools.
Then we quickly moved to the tiny beach segment called Middle Point—no dead birds there either, though more trash to pick up—and then adjourned as is JL's practice to the Breakwater Diner, before the drive home. We took WA113 and US 101 on the way home. No elk, no eagles either. We were home by 3PM.
