Tag Archives: Salish Sea

March 24, 2021 · 5:19 pm

Pick Up Sticks

  • By Heurtelions
  • By Paul Mayer

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

“We look at the world once in childhood. The rest is memory.” Louise Gluck

So clear is my memory of a screened-in porch on a modest Cape Cod style house where I lived as a child in West Hartford, Connecticut. It was a pleasant suburban neighborhood and our porch stood off to one side surrounded by leafy greenness. There in the shade of the porch we played board games upon a glasstop table, along with countless games of Pick Up Sticks. I considered myself steady of hand and quite skilled at it, but who knows; I was also the oldest of my siblings. 

Decades later, I live on San Juan Island, a sea-swept island in the Salish Sea off B.C. Canada. Famous for windstorms in winter, the ground frequently becomes saturated, trees keel over, and power goes out. Ferry rides are then either rough—with vehicles shifting during transit–or canceled. Winds rise and the waves up rise in winter, while islanders dress down in wind breakers and boots and take weather alerts in stride. 

After each windstorm, I enjoy picking up sticks and fallen branches. Clearing the decks, the drive, and the grassy area. The gravel area with a picnic table and firepit. The drunken bocce court. The woodpile, stacked kayaks, and dormant gardens fenced for deer. One bank covered in salal and another bank in heather, as well as our wooded areas. Clearing the property clears my mind. It’s much like editing a long rambling verse.

Now meet my neighbor down the road who has kicked it up a notch. About three years ago, Dave began picking up fallen twigs and branches and piling them, intermittently, while walking trails through the woods. His habit soon expanded to his walks on rural roads, around the loop by Roche Harbor and out to Neil Bay. There are more walkers than cars where we live. I contribute to these piles, and I like to think everyone does.

Dave’s goal is simple: to reduce the fuel load in the forest. Raised in Orange County, Southern California, fire consciousness was built into his DNA. In the summer of 1967 he worked with a fire crew in the Deschutes National Forest, near Sisters, Oregon. “There were so many fires that summer,” Dave recalls, “I made enough money to pay for two years of college.”

Each spring Dave rents a chipper and tows it on his truck while picking up stacks by the side of the roads. The piles on trails are reached by a Kubota tractor. Firewise, a voluntary program to reduce wildfire risks at the local level—there are three Firewise groups in our area alone–and Roche Harbor Resort provide partial funding for this effort. 

For my part I will always be picking up and piling sticks. As a writer I tie up a lot of loose ends in my head doing this, and I get to move my legs. I leave the truck, Kubota tractor, and chipper to my good neighbors.

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October 28, 2020 · 10:16 pm

A Tale of Two Islands

Photo by Paul Mayer

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

Harbors, lighthouses, beaches, wildlife, and farmlands describe both Martha’s Vineyard and San Juan Island, two seemingly idyllic islands at sea. Just off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Martha’s Vineyard is twice the size and primarily a summer colony. North of Seattle in the Salish Sea, just off B.C. Canada, San Juan Island also attracts its share of summer visitors. The climate on both islands is more temperate than the mainland. “The Vineyard” enjoys cooler summers and warmer winters than inland by a few degrees, and San Juan Island, far more sun than Seattle and an unusually dry climate for Western Washington.

Whaling brought Martha’s Vineyard to prominence in the 19th c, while a booming timber industry coupled with lime kiln operations nearly devastated old growth trees on San Juan Island. Today both islands are extraordinarily sensitive to fragile, vital ecosystems on land and water. On Martha’s Vineyard, approximately 65% of the island has been designated “Priority Habitat” for rare and endangered species of plants and animals. Similarly, San Juan Preservation Trust purchases and receives donations of land, protecting saltwater shores, woodlands, and one of the last remaining native prairies. 

Originally inhabited by indigenous people—Coast Salish peoples in the San Juan Islands, and Wampanoag people on Martha’s Vineyard where there is still a small population. Coast Salish tribes moved about all the San Juan Islands, following the seasons in what archaeologists call “a seasonal round,” fishing, hunting, and harvesting. As the U.S. government claimed the islands, it opened the land to homesteading for U.S. citizens, running Native Americans off the land they knew. 

Meanwhile over on Martha’s Vineyard, the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head is embroiled today in a court battle over the transformation of a community center into a casino on their reservation. So it’s not all roses there either. 

Here we are, two islands at sea all these years later without getting the first thing right: our relationship with indigenous peoples. We’re all on borrowed land.

Never forget that, we are all on borrowed land.

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November 16, 2016 · 6:25 pm

Thank You For Asking, But No, I Am Not Alright

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Photo By Paul Mayer

BY KIMBERLY A MAYER

I have my father on speed dial. He said to call any time I need to hear that our country, our world, will survive president-elect Trump. While the nation is going rogue, I am sitting on my island in the Salish Sea thinking this is not far enough away.

On election day, I wore ironed white linen in honor of the suffragettes. And Buddhist prayer beads around my neck for good measure. We were giddy then.

But I should have known. A Trump-sized migraine had preceded the election. His supporters were hiding in plain sight. Some were even hiding in my extended family.

Without ever having met, Donald Trump and I go way back.

My first husband was a narcissist, and I am here to tell you that nothing good can come of it. I don’t know how I survived, but imagine arriving in NYC in the 70’s after the storm of the marriage, arriving on my arse, so to speak. In an era when Donald Trump was the golden boy, or so he thought. Building golden towers, hideously gaudy to everyone else.

Even then I loathed him. I may have had conflicted feelings about my ex, but I was very clear on Donald J. Trump. I had a plan to walk out of any venue should he saunter in, or cross the street if I saw him coming—but of course he was always riding limos, then as now. And fortunately I was spared.

Over the years, after extensive analysis of these two men, I was able to define my feelings as a toxicity to narcissism. And so I stay away from those types. Now here it comes back to me, embodied in one of its original suits.

What to do? What to do? First I will write this. It’s as much for me, you understand, as it is a message-in-a- bottle to the world. I need to know that I can still write.

Then what? This is what it’s like after that election, when you don’t know if you can see straight, if you can find your feet, or get out of bed in the morning. It’s an awful lot like my divorce.

Next I’ll retrieve the piece that I had started to write before the election. On the Madrona Tree, and our shared DNA with trees. For someone is going to have to care a wit about the environment in this new era. Right?

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January 28, 2015 · 8:45 pm

Birdsong

trumpeter_swan

Sometimes it is all you can do to keep your head above water. When this happens, I know to take a long walk in the woods. Or, since moving to the country, hang around home and clear brush and fallen branches. And then there’s another tactic: get away.

Even if where you live is off the coast of Northern Washington, over the border with Canada in the outer reaches of an archipelago of islands in the Salish Sea, one may still feel the need to get away.

So my friend and I volunteered to count swans on Shaw Island last weekend for the Washington Department of Fish and Game, under the umbrella of Preservation Trust. Shaw is but a short ferry ride from San Juan Island, but in its way, worlds away.

You have to remember that an island is always a place apart.

My friend and her husband have been living in a trailer on site while building a custom home. This makes our remodel look like a walk in the park—although we did live on a boat for a few months. Boat, trailer, much the same. Small.

On a moored boat one may have to fend off otter. Into a trailer, mice will creep. And as much as she hates to do it, my friend sets mouse traps. When she catches one she puts on gloves, picks it up by its tail, walks down to the edge of Egg Lake and places the little mouse on a stump over the water. An offering to the eagles.

We live on a land of waters, and where there is water there will be birds. Salt water birds stay all winter, like us. And like us, they are easier to track.

But on this morning we were looking to report on the migratory pattern of swan upon Shaw Island. Dressed in outdoor gear, bearing binoculars, notebook and pen, we left in the dark to catch the first morning ferry. The irony was that at sunrise my friend’s lake, Egg Lake, would be full of swan. Trumpeter swan. But others would be responsible for the count on San Juan Island that morning. We were off to Shaw Island.

Our jeep drove down every open road on island—all 7.7 sq. m.–through heavily wooded forests searching for ponds, coves, inlets, anywhere swan might be found. Light green lichen dangled from branches like chandeliers. Out my side window I became mesmerized with the pattern of fences. Split-rail fences in every state of standing and collapsing, covered in emerald green moss.

We stopped in all the public places on Shaw—all three—to inquire. The grocery store was closed. A librarian opened the library for us. The postmaster inquired of his customers, and no, no one had seen swan on island for perhaps a year.

With no swan to report to the Department of Fish and Game and a couple hours before the next ferry, we turned our jeep into Our Lady of the Rock, a Benedictine Monastery for women. Here traditional habit-dressed, Gregorian-chanting cloistered nuns are “living out the liturgy through prayer, praise and contemplation” upon 300 acres of forest and farmland.

We didn’t see any nuns either.

Final Count

swans: 0

nuns: none

But we introduced ourselves to the Cotswols Sheep, Highland Cattle, Ilamas and alpacas, poultry and Jersey dairy cows. Said a prayer in the chapel and purchased infused vinegars. Got home and wished we had purchased herbs, mustard, and teas, as well as their famed “Monastery Cheese.”

I’ll be back, perhaps as a guest.

 

“This is my life and I don’t pretend to understand it.” Thomas Merton from his journals in solitary hermitage

 

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