David's New Favorite Word: Natural

David was never a perfectionist when it came to our lawn, but still, he wanted it to look good. (I'm convinced lawns are strictly a male thing, like reading the sports page in the morning paper.) When we were in the planning stages of our house I suggested we do away with a lawn entirely and plant some kind of ground cover, but no, to David there's a house, there's a lawn. I harbor my own opinion that it's just too damn much fun operating a rider mower to give it up for ground cover.

So what it came down to was that I was in charge of the garden in the immediate vicinity of the house (which did not include bushes, only flowers) and he was in charge of the rest of the property. We'd had to clear some of the woods for a new driveway and once the area on either side filled in again David decided that, apart from the lawn and my garden, everything else should remain "natural". It had been my idea to cut through the woods with a few unobtrusive, meandering paths, lay down wood chips and place outdoor wooden chairs a couple of places for just sitting and meditating. 

Then we got down to thinking about it. The regular maintenance it required in a climate where undergrowth takes over like a jungle convinced us it was too much work. And was this the kind of thing we'd really put to regular use? Probably not, but the idea had sounded cool when I'd first thought of it. I settled for a little clearing where I plopped down a hand made chair that seems to fit the flavor of the place--crudely constructed and half covered in moss and lichen, it's barely discernible in the middle of the woods, and occasionally I do go there and just sit and think.

But the "natural" thing started to get to me. Every time I wanted him to cut something down or trim it David would say no, we had to leave it natural. Some of the bushes started to obstruct part of the front window, but David wanted them to look natural, so they remained unpruned. Finally I took matters into my own hands and when he saw that I was prepared to override natural with what he considered inferior pruning he acquiesced and did it himself. 

Native salal covers most of the ground outside the lawn and garden area, and this became David's favorite plant because it looked natural. He would nurse it and prune around it so it could grow unchallenged by anything else to the point where it was covering and taking over not only the ground area in our woods, but creeping out and over the country lane we share with our neighbors. It was tall enough that it formed an obstruction to our view coming out of our driveway, and every time I came up and out onto the lane it was like playing Russian roulette with other cars. Being a country lane it didn't have much traffic, but still, I always inched my way out of our driveway afraid another car would broadside me.

When a neighbor finally took matters into his own hands and paid someone to cut both sides of the lane back so it would be possible to partially pull off to the side when meeting another car (it's only one lane wide) David was apoplectic. It was his property and he wanted it left natural. He was going to call the neighbor and remind him of the fact and that he had no business cutting down someone else's salal. 

I sat him down on the deck with a glass of wine after he got home that evening, told him such talk would accomplish nothing but hard feelings that would probably never go away, and decided there was only one way to handle this: treat him to his favorite dish, caramelized onion. I put it on to simmer and before long, as the fragrance wafted out and engulfed him he calmed like a lion in a catmint patch. It was better than arguing.  

Some Consequences Of Logging

Winter wind storms are just as common here as our glorious summers, and by the end of October each year we start removing deck furniture and anything else that might blow away. The old Adirondack chair that we keep on the edge of the bluff has a rope tied through a hole in one of it's legs which is in turn tied to a large fir tree, but it's far enough away from the house and the rope is short enough that it can't inflict any damage.

Our wind storms generally whip up slowly and come from the south. The islands' banked shorelines serve as a wind tunnel, and as the storms build into a fury we can hear fir branches landing on the roof and hitting the screens on the windows. After the first year we gave up trying to replace screens. Once the wind starts it's just a matter of time before the electricity goes out. It's never "if" the electricity goes out, it's always "when".  

In a wind storm red alders are the biggest danger, and in the Northwest they are known as junk trees because they snap easily in the wind, shatter, and scatter their parts. At least firs, although shedding occasional branches, usually come down in tact, in one direction. The danger from fir trees is that because they have a shallow root system they blow over fairly easily, roots and all, if a gust hits just right, but a forest or heavily wooded acreage of firs gets strength from its sheer numbers and density. When the wind hits the ones in front it breaks the force of it for the weaker ones in back.

Sometimes instead of clear cutting an area a logger will take only the commercially valuable trees, which are the mature Douglas firs. This is sometimes worse than clear cutting, for now the protection the younger trees derived from the mature trees is no longer available and become vulnerable, seldom lasting beyond that first prolonged gust. 

A few years ago some vacant property about a quarter of a mile down the road from us was sold, but before it was put on the market it was logged of all the valuable trees--a common occurrence--leaving nothing but a few junk trees and some very young firs. That year we had a bad wind storm early in November, and David and I were awakened by the increasing hissing intensity of fir branches being whipped in the strong wind. Our wind gage said gusts were up to 60 m.p.h. We're always concerned about the two firs on the edge of our bank overlooking the sound, which are about 50-75 years old, for if they were uprooted the chances were very good they would land directly on our house. But they've been there a long time and have lived through many storm seasons so we always knock on wood and hope for the best. 

As we looked out our bedroom deck doors that night to watch our bank firs bending precariously in the wind, their black branches gesticulating wildly against the dark grey velvet sky, we heard the unmistakable sharp crack that we've come to recognize as a tree snapping off and crashing to the ground. We ducked, reflexively, then ran to a front window and saw what we first thought was a fireworks display, but then realized was a tree that had taken down a power pole, cutting off our own power. We got through to the power company on our cell phones and they came that night to move the live wires off the road. But the next morning we saw it would be some time before anyone could even drive this road again, for it had happened on the newly logged vacant property. One of a couple of mature firs the logger, for some reason, had left standing had been uprooted and taken down the power pole first, then came eight or nine much younger firs. Those trees had lived through storms just as strong, but they'd had the forest of stronger ones in front of them. Now they had no protection and blew over like matchsticks.

Some years later, when the island had gone through an unusually rapid growth, which necessarily means extensive logging, another strong wind storm took down power lines all over. Almost without exception the trees that were blown down that year were the ones left by indiscriminate logging. That time we were out of power for three days. 

The Meaning Of "Island Time"

ABOVE: Dale fixes everything

Once we moved to the island I realized that my entire life up until then had been lived under an erroneous assumption regarding workmen or repairmen. The assumption was that if I called someone to have some kind of service performed and an answering machine or voice mail took the message I could expect a call back to acknowledge that the person had received the call and was or was not able to perform the service.

Well, that's not the way business is conducted on the island. The accepted custom is that you call and leave a message and then maybe two weeks or a month later the person will call you back and say now he is free to consider your request and work you into his schedule. Or, if he was too busy or not interested he would just not return the call at all. At first this infuriated me so I would simply call around to find someone else to do the job, although this was not always easy to do since workers here are at a premium.

Then I decided on another tactic. I would call, leave my message and add an addendum requesting an immediate call back to establish if there was an interest in even doing the job eventually, even though he might be too busy at the moment. Sometimes it actually worked, but they usually acted as though they were doing me some special favor by replying before they were ready to do the job. Commitment was not a highly prized character trait.

I finally hit on a godsend by the name of Dale. I've never known Dale's last name because everyone calls him just Dale and when you write him a check you make it out to "Dale's". Dale fixes everything, which solves a lot of my problems, but regrettably, he doesn't clear away downed trees, trim bushes, remove moss from roofs, pump septic tanks, or deliver gravel or compost. Dale careens around the island in his big red, white and blue panel truck with the word DALE hugely displayed on each side panel in a crosswise slant that takes up the entire space. You can spot it a mile away. It's a very canny move because he gives the impression of being ubiquitous, so when something in your house breaks the vision of his truck immediately comes to mind.

One winter we had suffered through a whole week of furnace failure with the local furnace repair service, and while they ordered wrong parts and acted as though they'd never seen a propane furnace, we froze. Finally, after investing over $400 we called it quits with the company and called Dale. When he took the call he was barreling around the island, as usual, and when I explained the situation he bellowed, "Well why the hell didn't you call me in the first place?!" "Well, geez, Dale," I whined, "I didn't know you fixed furnaces too!" "Well look at my ad in the Yellow Pages," he bellowed again, good naturedly indignant, "that's the first thing that's listed. I can be there in about an hour." He was, and it got fixed that day.

Dale not only fixes things well, he spins wonderful yarns about his life, which keeps David entertained. Watta guy!

Change Happens

Just when you think things are pretty great and you've finally found the place where you know you belong, along comes change. It's inevitable.

First a large supermarket was constructed on the edge of town just east of us on the mainland; the town you had to drive through to get to the island. It had been acres of farmland before, with a small mom and pop hamburger stand on the corner. But the supermarket was a welcome addition for most of us---as long as it wasn't on the island, which we wanted to keep as a rural haven. 

Two smaller markets that had been in town forever were so crowded on weekends the few checkout lines sometimes extended to the back of the store. On the island there were just a few convenience stores, so once we got to the mainland (about 5 miles from our house) we'd had to drive another 12 miles to get to a real supermarket. Now there's a second supermarket in town and the two smaller ones, local merchants who knew everyone by their first names, went out of business. Such is progress. 

There had been no stop lights or stop signs at all when we first drove through the area to look at property. None in the town and none on the island, but after the supermarket went in the first stop light was installed at that corner. Before we knew it there were 5 stop lights in town, another on the island with a second to go in sometime in late 2008. There goes the neighborhood!

We'd seen few cars on our first visit to look at property. Now it's bumper to bumper traffic most of the day. During rush hour it's impossible. Logging trucks became a ubiquitous sight as property was sold and logged off. Builders who bought large tracks of land for spec homes were the biggest offenders since it was cheaper just to make a clean sweep and clear cut everything. 

Soon we began to hear complaints from people who had lived here for years and were now having trouble with slides and drainage problems due to irresponsible new construction.

And two years ago another strip mall type supemarket went in as part of a plaza that contained lots of rental space as well as a gas station and a street was extended to accommodate it. Smaller gas stations in town began to close.

Island Summers Are To Die For!

Nirvana here on the islands is summer. I'd be surprised to learn there was another place in this country (earth?) that has more glorious summers. In spite of the rain that plagues us a good portion of the year our summers are dry. Not the hot dryness of the desert but rather a perfect balance of humidity and warmth. Your skin doesn't itch. Your mucous membranes don't feel as though you've been 10 hours in the air at 30,000 feet. You step outside from a non-airconditioned house--because no one has air conditioning here--and the sun gently warms your skin while a gentle breeze off the water prevents that baked feeling that summers elsewhere seem to bring.

We have an old Adirondack chair near the edge of the bluff that gets a good deal of use during the summer. Sitting in it, where the breeze is a little stronger than it is on our deck, we can look out over the green undergrowth and trees on the bank below and see the sound, its waves gently washing the shore in rhythmic, mesmerizing sighs, sailboats gliding by silently and an occasional power boat cutting a white wake as it buzzes past. If we listen we can hear our resident bald eagles call to each other in their easily recognizable high pitched warbling, and looking up we see them gliding high above the water coasting on thermals and then suddenly diving into a school of fish. The sun turns the water a bright blue and dances diamonds off the surface; we can barely make out beach houses on the next island, and the snow-topped Olympic Mountains are outlined behind. It would be a perfect place to read if one could concentrate, but I can never take my eyes from the scene in front of me.

In late evening the sun is a fiery red ball above the horizon that tints clouds to salmon and then appears to drop quickly into the sea as the air cools. I find myself asking, "How do I deserve all this beauty?"

The Year Of The Land Slides

It was one of those years that the Pacific Northwest dreads. Lots of rain, followed by snow, followed by more rain. Weather like that forebode bad things to come. 

On another island a sleeping couple was killed when their beach home was buried by a slide from the hill above. Some multi-million dollars homes on mainland bluffs in Seattle were lost to land slides too. Expensive real estate ended up in Elliott Bay. The newspaper was full of pictures of slides on our island too. In our neighborhood the one lane road down to the beach--so steep they had posted a sign at the top, now weathered with age, that said "Drive At Your Own Risk"--was washed out by a slide, and like a domino effect that slide triggered more slides that plowed into some houses below. Luckily no one was hurt, but the owners lost electricity for weeks and also lost access to their homes.

Most of the houses on waterfront or bluff property on our island were existing on borrowed time. The large wall map in the county office had most of those areas marked as "unstable". We'd had a geologic study done before we bought the property and the geologist pointed out that our bluff, thankfully, unlike those to the north of us and some to the south, was not prone to wholesale sloughing for two reasons: 1) The property owners before us had left trees and sturdy undergrowth in tact instead of cutting everything down to improve the view, which resulted in the soil being well anchored and able to absorb a good deal of rain water, and 2) Our part of the bluff supported the undergrowth because of its gradual sloping rather than the sheer drop from properties north. It didn't mean we were home free but we were less likely to have a massive slide.

We noticed just about all of our neighbors had better views than did we--that's why they'd bought the property--but they were all adjacent to each other above the same bare, sheer cliff that was slowly sloughing away because there was nothing growing on it to anchor it. That bad "year of the slides" reinforced to us the importance trees play in the ecosystem.

The soil on the bluff north of us had been saturated with rain that winter when about 6" of snow fell on top of it. When it warmed several days later the snow turned into more rain and the weight of the melting snow was all that was needed for the already unstable bluff to give way. Every tree, vine and other undergrowth had been stripped away years earlier, causing continual sloughing until that part of the bluff was now a sheer, steep drop instead of the gradual slope we had. The edge collapsed and slid onto the steep road directly below that led to the houses on the beach; that triggered more slides that washed out the road completely and slid into the backs of several homes.

Aside from the fact that the people on the beach now had no way of reaching their houses, they faced massive expenses getting the road, as well as their houses, repaired. One of the beach residents, an attorney, sent a letter to our association asking if our collective insurance companies would pay for the damage since the real estate that collapsed the road actually belonged to those on the bluff. Understandably, no one was in favor of this since an expensive claim would probably result in the loss of their insurance. 

However, the result of not agreeing to do it was a lawsuit filed against the owners of the property that caused the damage. We were thankful we weren't among those sued but as it turned out the lawsuit managed to extract only a nominal amount from the insurance companies. Since that road is private, rather than being owned by the county, the beach residents had to share monumental expenses having the road reinstalled and a retaining wall erected that would hopefully mitigate future slides.

Needless to say, feeling between the residents of the beach and the bluff has not been warm and fuzzy since!