Island Fun

I just returned from 3 days on Vashon Island with my friend Cyndi. She's been trying to get me over for a visit ever since she and Max moved there last year. I caught a very early bus on Tuesday, and the ferry across to the island...I was on the north side of the boat admiring the beautiful Olympic Mountains, when the ferry turned slightly to enter the dock...and there was Mt Rainier off the other side!
Cyndi met me at the ferry, and we explored a beach, a wooded trail, and the town of Vashon, where we had a lovely lunch at The Hardware Store...I love a good burger and fries, and recommend them here!

We watched deer in the yard, and then saw "Avatar" - I thought it was a beautiful movie, but we agreed it was somewhat lacking in plot and character development.

On Wednesday, we made goat-milk soap and I spent a lot of time running from window to window to watch the deer. The twin fawns were so cute! I got to visit a cool coffee roasterie, and bought some new herbs for tincturing at home. We went down to a different beach, and then back to watch "Coco Before Channel" , which is pretty good, but in French, so the subtitles were necessary for me to follow the story.

Many Thursdays Cyndi has to go to Duvall anyway, and so we planned our day around the ferry trip...beach first - the tide was out, and so I got to walk the mud flats and picked up a bunch of shells, and saw a huge crab, a many-legged starfish, and we caught a quick glimpse of an otter! Even though it was in the Sound, we think it was a River Otter, not a Sea Otter - but still a big thrill. Cyndi treated me to lunch at The Monkey Tree, a nice vegetarian place with great bread and the best chocolate chip cookies that are as big as a salad plate!

I'm truly blessed to have friends here in the Pacific Northwest! My first island stay was fun, and I'll be eager to go back for more island adventures!

What a Way to Spend a Saturday!

I'm not the partying kind...You won't find me dancing on a tabletop in my underwear at midnight while baying at the m0on and wearing a lampshade as a hat. Let that picture sink in...
Sometimes, though, I receive an invitation that's too good to pass up. Saturday I enjoyed a homemade wine tasting party up on Lake Margaret. It was a lovely, sunny and warm spring day. I laid for a while on the dock soaking up the vitamin D while fishermen cast into the clear water. Lake Margaret is home to a small population of native Cutthroat Trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii) , or so I hear.
The wine was good, the company pleasant, and Shannon's rabbit tart, beef liver pate, and bacon-wrapped dates with goat cheese were amazing.
I liked CW's dandelion wine. Jonathan's plum wine was good, but his blackberry wine was my favorite. Cyndi and Max brought a lovely raspberry meade and a tasty elderflower cordial. I tried them all over the course of the afternoon. We (10 or 12 of us at the height of the party) all enjoyed the array of food and drink without anyone behaving badly.
The highlight of the day was watching an Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) catch a fish then try to keep it when the Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus luekocephalus) swooped in to take it away!

Lair of the Leopard - Day 1

I stopped under the carved leopard’s head just outside the canvas-covered doorway of Malalo Ya Chui and wondered what I’d gotten myself into. Once I stepped inside the rustic 8-sided structure I would be committing – really committing - to spending nine months of my life with whomever I found inside.

Coming here was an act of desperation. I had to make some major changes in my life if I was going to survive… changes that I chose instead of the ones that had been chosen for me. I wondered if I had the courage to do it. I was already late. Would it really matter if I just slunk off down the trail to the parking lot and left? I’d be out the deposit, but it wasn’t too late to change my mind.

My Missouri eyes had not yet adjusted to the intense greens of the lush vegetation that surrounded me. I didn’t recognize many of the trees or plants. The giant Western Red cedars (Thuja plicata) looked familiar, if much larger than the cedar trees of home, and I saw Maple-like leaves, but the trees, Vine Maples ( Acer circinatum), were different from the Maples I was familiar with. The mosses and ferns were foreign to me. Even the birds I heard calling in the forest were not the birds I knew. This place was a jungle to me.

Then I remembered the reason I was here…To learn about new things and places... To expand my paremeters...There was a welcoming wood smoke wafting up from the center of the roof, and I reasoned that the people inside must be much like me…Who else would sign up for a naturalist training program? Knowing only that told me that I had more in common with them than I had with the majority of the people I’d ever met. I was going to be alright here.

I looked to the leopard for confirmation. Lair of the Leopard - that’s what Malalo Ya Chui means. It’s located on the property called Linne Doran, or Pond of the Otter, in the Cascade foothills near Duvall, Washington. I had enrolled in the Residential Program at the Wilderness Awareness School. I was 2000 miles from home…and closer to Home than I ever had been.

The leopard was silent, letting me choose. I chose to go in. The moment I lifted the canvas to enter I knew I’d made the right decision. I can’t explain it. It just felt right, and good, and comfortable. The gut feeling I’d had when I’d stumbled on to the school’s website returned with a power that took my breath. This was where I was supposed to be now, this year, this class. This was where I needed to be. A thought came so fast and hard that I could not disbelieve it. “This is where you can heal.” Intuition is something that I had come to respect the hard way. I am a believer. I entered the lair.

Of Formerly Stray Cats, Target Balls and Arkansas Pecans

This is the story that my friend Margaret asked for early on in this blog. For her, I'll retell it. Rest assured that no cats were injured and no target balls broken...

In the fall of 1999, the RB talked me into building a house. I thought it was a bad idea for a lot of reasons, the least of which being that the little voice in my head was screaming, "Don't do it!" And that's a story for another day, because if I get off on that trail, you will never know what happened with the cat...to move things along, I'll just say that the house was built and we moved in over Labor Day weekend of the year 2000 with our 3 older Brittany Spaniels. And God started to send stray cats to the door. In short order, I'd taken in a beautiful Siamese cross female I called Clara, and her half-brother, a sleek black shorthair I called Gus.

Never, never start to name stray animals after characters in a large book. Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove" has a cast of...well, lots of interesting characters. Before I was done, I'd fed half of them in feline form.

Time passed, and the cats had their surgeries and grew to young adulthood. The dogs adjusted, and my sister's family came up from Arkansas to visit. Susan brought me a Wal-Mart bag full of big Arkansas pecans in the shell, which she gave me as an afterthought as they were packing the car to go home. I sat the bag on the table and said goodby to my sister and her family. I should have taken care of the pecans, but the mail had come and I had a big envelope from a guy named Ralph Finch.

To explain that, I have to tell you that I like to think of myself as a target ball collector. I have 2. What's a target ball? Think Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and Capt. Bogardus (and if you know who the Captain was, we really should talk). In their time, they were the champion target shooters. And what they most often shot were blown glass target balls. Not a whole lot of them survive, and all but the plainest bring good prices on e-bay. I got my first, a 3-piece unmarked amber one, at a local auction. One of the guys bidding against me gave me Ralph's name, as he's the editor of "On Target", and a respected authority on all things relating to target balls. I'd sent Ralph a check and a request for back issues of the magazine, and that's what was in the envelope. I wanted to sit down and read at least one issue before cleaning up.

As cats are apt to do, Gus decided to get on the table and investigate the white bag...and he managed to loop the handle over his head, which scared him. I heard him hit the floor with a yowl, immediatly followed by the thump of the heavy pecan bag. Before I could drop the magazine, Gus had made 2 circuits around the dining room/kitchen/living room, and had bounced off the big picture window before heading down the hall to hide under the bed. The bag flew after him like Superman's cape, slinging pecans every which way.

Gus eventually came out from under the bed and allowed me to remove the tattered remains of the bag from his neck. He stayed off the table after that. Every time I vaccumed, I found pecans. When I moved out a couple of years later, there were still a few under the couch.

Clara's sitting by the door looking out the glass as I write, but Gus disappeared into the forest not long after I got to Washington. She hasn't said what happened to him. Always the adventurer, I expect he tried to make friends with a coyote or a bobcat... I searched for him for many weeks but never found any sign.