Squirreling

I did spend a good part of my free time this summer indulging my nomadic urges, seeking out bodies of water to paddle and letting the road have its way with me.

As the abundance at the Farmer's Market built up I started to feel guilty. I was making like the merry (irresponsible)  grashopper of the story. Winter is coming when NOTHING grows.

 No problem: throw money at the feeling and maybe it will go away. I bought a dehydrator and a box of beautiful, sweet, organic peaches harvested from an orchard nearby.

My first attempts at drying peaches are a little strange and tough.  They take me back more than 35 years to the Cedarberg in the old country, buying peaches on the side of a dusty road en route to Wupperthal. A flavour on the tongue, like a scent, invokes memory. I was unbelievably young and didn't know it. Even then the road was having its way with me.

Fruit leather seems a better option and more efficient use of the dehydrator. A puree of one banana, 5 peaches and couple of slivers Hawaiian yellow ginger root makes the most amazing sweetmeat some 20 hours later. Not to mention the heavenly smell of warm peach which suffuses the house, wafting even out onto the street.

Looking peachy for the winter months. Will it last?

Rainbow harvest: reaping what was sown

Finally on the dark of the moon last weekend I harvested the rainbow field of Painted Mountain corn dreams.

There was some patchy fertilization but  a fair proportion of slim cobs with regular rainbow seeds looking like colourful bead work.

There is so much variation and lots of surprises:  sometimes a white husked parcel will unwrap to reveal deep plum. Unwrapping each ear was a surprise. My hands were stained garnet from the deep dark husks. The way the colour came off on my skin leads me to wonder whether the husks could be used to colour cloth. Certainly I could have painted a bit with scrunched up cornhusks.

Spread out together, the ears remind me of feathered and beaded regalia fit for a harvest pow wow.

Everything is real real dry in the garden now.

The rustling papery corn stalks will go to decorate my library. Birds are gorging on the cosmos seeds and insects glean where they can.

Poppy and coriander seeds will flavour my winter which I hope will include some small amount of rainbow corn bread. When I have worked out how I am going to grind that rainbow.

Brother sun, sister moon: fiery days and nights

Driving home from yet another meeting in the real far south end of the county a few nights back, I must have missed a million deer by a whisker.  The creamy yellow crescent hanging on the horizon monopolized my eyes while deer danced in the road all about me.

It was a scary hazy equinox this time around, with the sun rising post-apocalyptic red in the smokey sky. No rain in the forecast and wildfires having their way.

Breathe, they say and it will all be okay. No way in this smoke, I say.

This place is so dry right now that it seems just running one's eyes across the landscape will generate enough friction to start a fire.

These are my days and nights. Dark, shrouded and smokey, filled with anxiety and only the swelling moon for company

....
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.

T. S. Eliot

Incognito failure: peek-a-boo I see you!

A cheese yellow crescent lured me and my bicycle home last night after another interminable meeting of the less than honourable.

By the time I get to the garden it turns into a game of peek a boo. Not even the late summer density of trees can hide that night time radiance though days are  hazy with eerie, uneasy-making, wildfire smoke filtered light. There's an old faded photograph look to this whole sick town business. Déja vu

In this morning's dawn there's just a lone star now.

This cowgirl's gotta ride soon. Waiting on those Spanish boots of Spanish leather

Motherless

Motherless a year and still searching for a rock.

Mother in a pensive mood while on honeymoon in the Kruger National Park.

Hanging out on the horns: no dilemma

Hanging out in the dawn sky, hope is impaled on the sharpening horns of a waning moon.

Until vanquished by the garbage truck.

In some places taking away the trash is more important than having a library.

In memoriam: eleven the illuminator

Asking for the moon in a dream of blue, jet streaked.

Eleven years and counting. Destination illumination. Are we there yet?

Can't fix emptiness or giving the finger to the dike

Dreamed I walked into my library and it was empty. No books, no shelves, no computers, no furniture. Nothing. People started pouring in the windows and doors, streaming through the brickwork clamouring for books, internet, help. Noise rises to a crescendo of demands. I try to push them out while I try to "fix" the emptiness but they keep flowing in.

Woke up to the pre-dawn train rumbling through town, shaking windows and rattling doors.

I don't need an interpretor of dreams to tell me the news.

You can't fix emptiness.

Been too long since last I was in India.

Note: no matter the multiplicity of interpretations put upon the word dike this one from mythology might enlighten some.

Holy mackerel

Sometimes the fabric of the day is all one has:  shifting illusions of light. Ask for the sky and you might just be given a splendour of cloud.

Abundant August in the garden

One of the hottest, driest Augusts on record, gardening this month often consisted of turning on the sprinkler for a few hours in the evenings.

Things bloomed and fruited or vege-ed.

The Painted Mountain corn have slowly swelling cobs of appropriately painted colours: pale green, green, variegated and deep plum, just like their stems. Admiring my mielie (corn to some of you) field I look squinty eyed and I see a hillslope of Nguni cattle grazing.

A little rebel piece of India blossoms in my vegetable patch.

Late in the month, around 25 August, there is a freeze warning. Luckily it is a Friday when this comes. I harvest bucket loads of beans and all the marigolds. Garlands all around and ziplock baggies of frozen beans laid up for winter. The plants are just so productive!

I am on a squrreling roll so I buy up all the raspberries, strawberries and blueberries I can at the Farmer's Market. Freeze them too: breakfast smoothies in months to come.

Honouring the manu

Sometimes sacrifices have to be made. The sharks must be fed. 

Whether it is worth it is always an unknown.

Yes I mourn the murder of the month old baby dreadlocks. 

Yes I will grow my hair again. Yes, I will be dreadlocked again one day.

That said it has been an very interesting journey. Taught me a lot. The people who have reached out to mourn the dreadlocks along with me are ones whom I admire and respect and consider to walk their own paths of integrity. They walk in beauty as the saying goes.

The people who have celebrated and applauded the newly shorn mane are generally not those I would call friend. At least twice when I have had my cap on, women have squealed :"Ooooh you cut your hair. Cuuuuuuute." The sincerity of those overeffusive squealers does not bear dignifying with much  comment.  How they could they see anything with the kind of floppy cloth caps I wear I don't know. I could have had a whole family of dreadlocked beings in there. 

But I don't. I have learned some things. Generally I don't regret much but I regret the murder of the baby dreads. Invisibility has a price. Showing one's hand is all about timing.

On not finding Paradise: waiting for my ship to come in

My San Juan trip was also a scouting journey. I had heard about this sweet little cedar cabin for sale and had the opportunity to try it on for size.

I loved the spirit of the property and cabin, the integrity in its construction, the proximity to salt water which island living affords and the sun was very good to me during my sojourn - THREE whole days of cloudlessness in the Pacific Northwest! It must have been August.

On the more weightier side of the scale, for me, are the incredibly long ferry waits and the somewhat trendy, touristy nature of the settlements: Friday Harbor had no appeal for me beyond the library, written up here, and a certain eating house of which more later in this post, while Roche Harbor, pretty to overlook at sunset, exhibits the worst kind of monied we-don't-need-your-kind attitude. All those yachts and terraced housing and the high cost of parking are detractions.

Then too losing my spray skirt and life jacket at San Juan County Park were bad omens. I do not want to live in a tourist spot where people have no respect for anyone behaving like a local. Locals leave their things to dry on logs, trusting that they will be there the next time they want them. Yes, more fool me for trusting but my tent was not many feet away.

The shady, deep in the woods nature of the property also worked against it for me. I do like to grow a bit of food. I have probably become accustomed to the high blue summer skies on the eastern side of the state. This little cabin would be a perfect meditation retreat but would not work for a year round encampment for me.

So I packed my things and hung out in the ferry line for five hours. I was not so lucky this time and was the first vehicle in line for the next ferry. Hate when that happens, but it must have happened to the vehicle behind me on the crossing over. Now it was my turn. What goes around, comes around and all those kind of philosophical platitudes.

Possibly the best thing about Friday Harbour is the Doctor's Office an excellent establishment which serves just my kind of food: a whole menu of fresh squeezed raw fruit and vegetable juices with lovely names like Johnny Jump Up (strawberry, banana, orange) and Hairy Ape (ginger, orange, banana, apple),  and magnificent veggie sandwiches - I can heartily recommend the Famous Veggie (as mentioned in the New York Times) or the Baba Ganoush Veggie Wrap. They got all my tourist dollars. A vegan friendly eating house. At last!

I believe they also do espresso and homemade icecream. Situated in a Victorian building, conveniently facing onto the ferry parking lot, with wifi and a magnificent porch overlooking the harbour and the ferry dock, it is not a bad way to spend a long wait. Sitting at that table, it is possible to see one's ship come in. In a manner of speaking.

I realized during those five hours spent watching the light change,  that a lot of the atmosphere of Friday Harbor is because it is host to people waiting long hours for a ferry boat. They drift aimlessly. Desultory and disappointed, passing the time idly.

It doesn't help that this was a return journey. Always the hardest one for me: the long road back. Return is possibly one of my worst words in my lexicon.

Crows and geese: paddling San Juan island day 2

Still reporting on my San Juan island paddle of a few weeks back.

Day 2, I didn't have to wait for a ranger,  so was at the water at first light. It was real real low tide. The water in the bay was glassy-calm.

My good goose friends Branta canadensis were there to greet me, feeding on seaweed in the bay, accompanied by much appreciative goosey sounds.

Crows were taking their beach command detail really seriously. I received a lot of instruction and comment from that quarter.

The lovely mood of the morning was spoiled a little when I discovered that overnight someone had stolen my sprayskirt and life jacket (aka a PFD - personal flotation device -  in this county) from where they were drying on the logs alongside the kayaks. The best explanation is that some helpful person from the tour groups packed it up with their stuff thinking it was theirs, even though my equipment was real far along and clearly associated (I would have thought) with my Eddyline kayak. Anyone out there with a grey Seattle Sports, somewhat weathered, spray skirt that isn't theirs, picked up on San Juan island, do contact me. The life jacket was an online cheapie and I had been meaning to replace so not so worries about that - I suspect that it wouldn't save a life in waves -  but the spray skirt is another story. It has paddled a good few miles with me and the Merlin kayak. And anyway, damnit, don't just take stuff which isn't yours!

Having no spray skirt and life jacket did change my paddle on day two. Maybe I shouldn't have gone out at all - these two are pretty essential equipment for cold water paddling,  and my safety whistle was attached to the life jacket. It was a real downer but the morning was too beautiful to spoil.

I launched and paddled real close to the coast line as much as possible, with the satin water folding away from my bows.

Even though it was incredibly beautiful, I was tense, worried about waves swamping me and all that silly kind of stuff. I had to remind myself that all my early paddles in these northern waters were without either life vest or spray skirt and in a beluga of a Wind Dancer. Have I become more fearful and cowardly after more than a decade in this nanny culture? Lost some of my independence, trust and sense of adventure? But then those early paddles were also only on sunny still days in the sheltered waters off Doe Keg Watts and Indianola where I knew the beaches and people were all about. This San Juan experience was different: I was paddling around an unfamiliar island in the ocean, alone and without the most basic safety gear.

 The light was sublime. Early morning is still my favorite time of day on the water.

I saw a couple doing tai chi on a rock in the dawn. I turned back without doing as long a paddle as I had planned when I came to a headland where the confluence had the water turbulent:  frothing and churning. A bad experience off Orcas island last year has me very respectful of island currents and tides.

As if losing my equipment wasn't enough, crows stole my breakfast cherries from the kayak whilst I was fetching my parked vehicle.

The island experience was getting a bit of a bad taste.

I sat on the logs a long time feeling blue and far from home, watching geese feed and crows strut.