King Oscar and the lighthouse

If you've lived around the Puget Sound for any length of time, you know about The Gray.

It has other names, of course. The Gloomy Season. The Big Dark. The Drizzle. Or, as they say in a particular movie, "It rains nine months of the year in Seattle." The constant overcast and light-to-heavy rainfall, combined with our location above the 45th Parallel, means that from November to March the Puget Sound skies are almost unrelentingly dark, foggy, or both. If you don't already have Seasonal Affective Disorder, you'll start to develop a touch of it in midwinter. You need to develop strategies to fight The Gray or it will overwhelm you and shut you down.

Now if this were a normal time, I'd fight The Gray by being with people. I'd visit family and friends. I'd go to Bremerton's nerd pubs and play pinball or cabinet video games. I'd strike up conversations with friendly strangers in the library. I'd gather with local geeks to play board games. I'd go to storytelling nights and hear about people's adventures from their own mouths. I'd meet people and I'd make friends.

But this is not a normal time.

I don't want to get sick. I don't want to make other people sick. I can't be successfully frugal AND spend much time with local friends, since it takes time and money to visit our old stomping grounds on the Eastside. And with a couple of rare exceptions, I haven't gotten out enough to meet any new people around here. I've been strongly isolated. And isolation is no way to fight The Gray.

What to do?

Well, if you're me, which I am, you knit and crochet while listening to back episodes of The Magnus Archives, putter around the house, cook, read library books, spend way too much time bingeing YouTube videos. And when you tire of that, you go troll hunting.

Today, since Captain Midnight was determined to DM some D&D deeds of derring-do, I was on my own for the afternoon. The Gray was lowering and unrelenting, but it was not a day to stay in. So I stole CM's jacket, gathered up the usual bundle of accoutrements (vitamins, water bottle, hot chocolatey goodness) and made for the ferry to Vashon Island.

You might not consider Vashon a prime spot to hunt for trolls, and ordinarily I'd agree with you. It's a fine place to find aging hippies, bike-eating trees, and (if rumor is correct) several ferocious local strains of cannabis, but until recently the only certain locale for Scandinavian cryptids was under the Aurora Avenue bridge in Seattle.

And then Thomas Dambo and crew came along and shook things up. But we'll get to that in a bit.

It usually takes a while to drive from our current digs to the Southworth ferry dock in Port Orchard. It usually takes even longer for the Southworth/Vashon/Fauntleroy ferry to show up -- so much so that on the rare occasions when I've used it to get back to Kitsap from Seattle, I end up waiting so long that I'd have made better time just driving around Tacoma and up the peninsula. CM and I usually refer to it as "the cursed ferry." So to my great delight, I didn't have to wait more than 10 minutes for the cursed ferry to arrive at Southworth Dock. And it didn't take another 10 minutes to make the crossing from there to Vashon.

Despite the gloominess of the day, I enjoyed my first look at Vashon Island. I couldn't live there, as there's no hospital or even a basic medical clinic, and everything has to reach the island by boat or helicopter. But it has a remarkable number of creative people per capita, and it's beautiful.

I drove merrily through the cute little downtown area, took a turn to the left and continued to follow driving directions for... far longer than I'd expected. How long should it take to reach any spot on an island of 37 square miles? As the roadway narrowed and twisted, I pulled over and sent a quick text to my siblings: "This place is in the middle of nowhere. IF I SHOULD FALL, TELL MY STORY"

Just then, though, the end hove in sight: the upper parking lot of the Point Robinson Lighthouse. 'Bout time.

(BTW, if you're new to troll hunting, look around for clusters of painted birdhouses like these. They're a sure sign that trolls are nearby.)

Since I'd never been to Point Robinson before, I was also curious about the lighthouse. And at the time it seemed like a lot of people were paying homage to King Oscar. So I thought I'd just pop down and see the lighthouse first.

This turned out to be a mistake. Not the seeing-the-lighthouse part, the taking-this-route part. I headed down a forest trail that quickly became slick with mud and crud and slippery fallen leaves, and there were no handrails to cling to. Frankly, it's a minor miracle that I didn't slip and fall on my butt, BUT(t) somehow I SLOWLY worked my way down, walking like a little granny, and made it to the end of the path relatively unscathed (though it's a good thing my shoes were designed to be laundered).

And here's what I found!

Let's take a closer look, shall we?

Ah yes indeed, very nice. 

No official tours until Mother's Day, more's the pity. But we're good at showing ourselves around the place.

After taking a few more attractive foties...

...I decided to head back. Though by this time I'd figured out there was another route up to the parking lot, so I didn't have to run the mud gauntlet again. Which is good, because I don't think my shoes could've taken it.

Lessee, what was I doing here again? Oh yeah.

In a circular clearing not too far away... there was King Oscar holding court, surrounded by birdhouse clusters on poles. And a lot of fans.

If you're curious to know more about him, there's a helpful plaque nearby that goes into more detail about Oscar and about Thomas Dambo, the Danish artist who created him (and other trolls) out of local scrap wood.

Like most wise rulers, Oscar's staying off his feet today.

He looks so much more handsome in person than he does on the sardine cans. Also I like his birdhouse crown. Very chic.

Someone had used a few local clams to give him a fabulous pedicure. As you do.

I handed my phone to an innocent bystander and proceeded to commune with the King.

Now we're officially BFFs. If you can't be a king, it's at least nice to know one.

I wasn't through exploring yet, though.

Not far from the King's court was this mysterious object.

Other than possibly being some kind of cryptic municipal art, I have no idea what it was.

If you know, do clue me in, won't you? I'm most curious.

And then I ran off and took goofy selfies in front of a mural because I could.

Anyway, that's one way to fight The Gray. And it worked pretty well if I do say so myself!

This is just to say...

 Bob Pardo died today. He was 89 years old.

The deadman switch

HEN I first started writing this blog in 2006, mass social media platforms like Facebook hadn't taken off yet, so it was fairly common for people to read each other's blogs and make comments directly on the site. I had a few regulars who would come by, read the latest post and make a few comments. In turn I would often follow links back to their blogs, read what they were up to and make comments as well. (This was how I got to know Gretel, for instance.) As Facebook and other social media sites took off, however, and as blog-supporting software like RSS no longer received updates, the number of regular commenters on most blogs slowly dropped off. It's now quite rare for me to get a comment on any blog post, old or new.

Social media is now old enough that we're starting to think about the greater consequences of what we say and do online. We think about the future more than we did back when the medium was still a novelty. And one of the things we rarely thought about in the early days was mortality.

Back in the day I had a regular poster on my blog, an artist who lived in middle America, and in return I'd often visit and read her blogs and make comments on her posts. A while back, I realized I hadn't heard from her in ages. So I popped over to her blogs and noticed it had been multiple years since her last update.

Now, it's quite possible that she just fell out of love with blogging. That happens. Or it's possible that she was going through a dry spell. (My last entry on this blog was back in May, for instance.) But I also knew that this particular blogger was past retirement age when we first started exchanging pleasantries online. I'd never met her in person; she lived thousands of miles away from me, albeit in the same country. Blogging was my only connection to her. So it's also quite possible that she stopped posting because she passed away. And other than searching for her name in online obituaries, I have no way of determining what really happened to her.

I'm not much of a musician, but I know how important it is for any musical piece to have a coda. As human beings, we crave definitive endings -- what is sometimes cloyingly called "closure." And I've been thinking about how human mortality fits into online writing. When you know you are sick, for instance, and that your illness is likely to end you, you have the time to think about how to craft an ending and how to say goodbye to anyone who might be reading. But there are many other people for whom death comes swiftly and without warning, as it did for both my parents. Unless you have some real-world connection to such people, there might be no online indication about what happened to them. They just seem to vanish.

So although I have no intention of kicking off any time soon, I now have the literary equivalent of a deadman switch on this blog. It's scheduled to post automatically at a set date many years in the future, assuming Blogspot is still around, to let potential readers know that if they're reading the post, it means I've died. I'll update it every now and then to make sure the particulars are as accurate as I can make them. I'll push the publishing date into the future as necessary. And I'll let CM know it's there so that, assuming he survives me, he can publish it immediately upon my demise if he chooses.

I know this might seem a touch morbid, but the way I see it, it's a good idea to be prepared for eventualities. And whether or not we want to face it, every one of us will die eventually. But this way, no matter what the circumstances of my death may be, my little story online will have the ending I choose for it.

The trail to the tree

When I was a kid, growing up in California and Utah, I quickly learned to hate going on hikes.

And today I took a hike -- and loved it.

Frankly, if you'd told 2015 me that I would eventually choose to hike, of my own volition, without a gun to my back, I would have laughed and told you to up your dosage. But I'm starting to come around for a number of reasons.

Last week I had the pleasure of dogsitting a very good and well-behaved boy named Eddie. When family is away, sticking to a pet's everyday schedule helps foster a feeling of calm and reassurance, so I made sure to take Eddie on his usual twice-daily walks. While there were a few times when it felt like he was dragging me up and down hills at the end of a leash, most of the time I didn't have trouble keeping up with him. And when I took him to off-leash parks, I didn't even have to do that -- he could snuff around in the underbrush looking for squirrels to harass, and I could walk along the trail nearby, keeping an eye on him without having to run to catch up. It didn't feel difficult because I had plenty of chances to stop and rest, and it was genuinely pleasant walking in the woods and along the beaches of Puget Sound. So at the end of the first day, I was shocked to discover that I'd hit my 10,000 daily step goal for the first time since the thoroughly exhausting day we packed up and moved out of our Redmond house. Because of those daily walks, I continued to meet or exceed that goal pretty much effortlessly every day I took care of Eddie. I wasn't even waking up sore the next morning.

Once I returned home, I did a little thinking and realized I didn't have to take Eddie with me to achieve that step goal (or at least get close to it), as long as I was willing to find a local park, beach, or trail and do the walking on my own.

So why is this a big deal?

Well, today I realized that I still do hate hikes, but -- and this is the big breakthrough -- only specific KINDS of hikes. I hated the double-digit-miles, strenuous group hikes that were part of my childhood in both the Camp Fire Girls and the church-sponsored camping trips for young women. Such hikes were usually conducted during the hottest part of the day, so we'd have to carry metal canteens with us, which were heavy, unwieldy, clanked against our hip bones and often leaked all over our clothes. The fastest hikers in the group were usually allowed to set the pace, which meant that the slowest of us (it meeee) never got a breather. The folks in front were told to stop every now and then to rest and let the slower hikers catch up, but as soon as the last person caught up with the group, everyone would immediately start off again. (And the unspoken idea among the adult leaders, I think, was that the slower hikers could stand to lose some weight anyway, so why should they get a break?) The parts of California and Utah where I grew up were arid, with little shade along the average hike, meaning that it was a deeply uncomfortable experience for anyone who was slow, fat, and sweated heavily. These hikes sucked all the fun out of the experience for me, and the minute I could avoid them, I stopped going.

This was a shame, because there were many things about nature hikes that I loved. I loved coming across small creatures in their own habitats. I loved seeing all the different plants growing and the spicy smell of the red earth and the graceful shape and movement of the trees. And, frankly, I often made no effort to catch up with the group because I liked taking things at my own pace and enjoyed feeling like I was alone in nature.

Today it occurred to me that if I hiked by myself, I wouldn't have to worry about keeping up with the group because there wouldn't be one.

I wouldn't have to worry about getting sweaty and muggy because this is the Pacific Northwest and even in the heat of the day, there's plentiful shade from large trees on most hiking trails. I wouldn't even have to carry water with me on the short trails; I could tackle them without getting dehydrated. And although I'm still obese, I weigh about 100 pounds less than I did a decade ago, so moving my body isn't as difficult or painful as it was back then.

Further, because every trail and park and beach and green space on this peninsula is new to me, it feels like an adventure to be exploring each one for the first time.

It feels like I could be going anywhere. And that's the thing I enjoyed most about hiking when I was a child: that sense of adventure, of stepping into unknown territory, what I would later call liminal space, where anything could happen.

I had the trail all to myself today. Literally, I didn't see another human being on the entire hike.

In fact, the trail was infrequently traversed enough that I kept having to hold my hand up in front of me so I didn't accidentally walk face-first into a spiderweb crisscrossing the space.

At one point a little garter snake crossed my path. He slipped away as quickly as he could, so I didn't take his picture, but he was a beautiful deep brown with lengthwise yellow bands.

Seeing a lot of these plants put me in mind of Stephan Seable. When I was growing up in California, he taught us kids about which local plants were safe and good to eat. I recognized a few of these, things like fiddleheads and so forth, but for the most part everything was new to me.

Oh hey, wild bleeding hearts!

As I continued down the trail I began to hear the sound of running water, which always makes my heart happy.

But the original trail bridge over the creek (as seen here) was permanently closed.

So instead I took this one! Built like (and possibly by) a truck!

I made like a Billy Goat Gruff and trip-trapped over this thing in no time.

Made it to the big tree after which the trail is named (in this case, it's a Douglas fir), and it is indeed big.

While I have seen larger trees in Big Trees State Park and in Sequoia National Park in California, the difference is that this tree is notably larger than all the other trees around it.

It is singular.

Sat for a while on the flip-top bench near the big tree and just listened to the creek running by. There were a few birds piping in the trees, the sound of what was probably a diurnal owl, squirrels chittering at each other, and probably if I waited there long enough another snake (or the same snake) would show up.

A single white butterfly floated around the ferns and bracken. It occurred to me that it's been a long time since I've seen a butterfly in the wild. 50-odd years ago when I was little, you could find monarch caterpillars and butterflies everywhere there was open space and milkweed growing. But now a lot of those open spaces have been plowed over and turned into houses and condominiums, and no one grows milkweed. So a lot of the places where the monarchs used to grow up are gone. These days if you choose to plant milkweed in your yard there's a good chance you will become part of the monarchs' migration path every year, because there is so little wild space left for them to exist in.

This forest was exactly the kind I would have adored when I was a child. Frankly, I still do. It felt like the kind of spot a fairy tale would take place in.

You could easily imagine a slightly anthropomorphic wolf stepping from behind a tree to convince a little girl to pick trilliums by the side of the path.

Or a hollow tree where six princes in exile are living, until such time as it is safe for them to return to their kingdom.

Or maybe some kind of forest wizard.

Perhaps a nixy might rise up out of the water and offer a challenge or request a favor.

Or, you know, you could even find Piglet's house.

That's what liminal spaces are -- places where the unlikely or the unusual are much more willing to happen. A liminal space is a place that humans have not yet pegged down, squared off, and gentrified in some way.

Or it's a place that refuses to be tamed. It's where the human notions of cause and effect, of what they expect to happen, do not apply.

I realize that going on a hike by oneself is potentially dangerous. (At the time I write this, actor Julian Sands is missing and presumed dead after having gone on a hike alone in midwinter.) But the advantage to hiking solo in a relatively safe place is that you can walk at the best pace for you.

If you're heading up along a steep switchback and you feel tired, you can stop and rest until you're ready to continue, and no one will be tapping a foot or looking meaningfully at a watch.

If you want to take a closer look at a tree, a flower, a bush, a spiderweb, a squirrel, a snake, or even a cougar from a safe distance, you can stop and take all the time you need. (It's probably worth noting that even though this is cougar territory, I'm not particularly afraid of meeting one out here. Cougars are not highly aggressive toward humans; they tend to be far more scared of us than we are of them.)

At the top of the trailhead there were several human-made artworks, most attempting to bring some whimsy or magical quality to the area.

But honestly, they didn't hold a candle to the real thing.

I'll be looking for more trails around here very soon.