Outside

Adventuring

Jun 25, 2016 By Sarah in Island, Knit Local, Musing, North Country Cheviot, Outside, Salt Spring mitts, Traveling 1 Comment Tags: North Country Cheviot

Friday, 10am: The journey begins on a clear June day. Some clouds pretending innocence are loitering in the west, no threat to a beautiful summer’s day in this mild, maritime climate. The ferry poots a warning to the lesser boats, leaves Friday Harbor and rumbles northwest. Sea lions have rafted up to bask on a rock off Yellow Island, warm and tawny in the sunlight and still as driftwood. It has been an unusually dry spring and the islands are showing their golden flanks and shoulders—their August plumage. The sea is sparkling and the kelp beds wink and glisten. A flock of gulls is squabbling over a little run of fish.

Down on the car deck, my blue station wagon holds a tent, a sleeping bag, an LED lantern, a rain jacket, and three clear drum liners stuffed with North Country Cheviot wool. We’re nearing the international border now, crossing from the San Juans into the Gulf Islands, one archipelago with two names parted by an imaginary line drawn by a German Kaiser at the end of the 19^th century to resolve some armed bickering over a dead pig. To the north is Salt Spring Island. It’s only about 14 miles from my island to this one as the orca swims, but today I’ll set foot on Salt Spring for the first time. My three bags full are bound for the Gulf Islands Cooperative Spinning Mill.

11:30am: It turns out Americans don’t try to breeze through Sidney Customs with carloads of agricultural product very often. Or ever. Three agents consult on what’s to be done with me and my wool, asking questions about the state of my tires and shoes in the friendliest of manners. They are relieved to hear I don’t drive the family car about the sheep pasture or into the barn. They are ever so pleased to hear about the hours I spent picking seeds and manure out of the fleeces and charitably decide it must be mostly clean. They wish I had a firmer figure for the value of three bags of fleece, but in the end they nicely send me on my way.

This post is photo heavy so I scaled them smaller than usual. Click for better!

1:30pm: Salt Spring’s topography is more amplified than I had realized. My island works up to its heights, so I wasn’t prepared for big hills rearing right out of the sea. Roadwise, it’s completely different from home. Beaver Point Road swoops and veers; every corner is blind. It seems possible that this route was engineered by barn swallows. Noted: If you don’t have a farm stand at the end of your driveway, you’re certainly not keeping up with the Salt Spring Joneses.

2:00pm: I’ve parked at Ruckle Provincial Park and trotted down a woodsy path toward the sea with my tent under my arm to claim a campsite. This tent dates to my childhood and is looking a bit sun crisped. The rain fly is sporting some duct tape, but it’s better than the one to my tent, which disintegrated last time I pulled it from the sack. I’m grateful to my parents for the loan. And the dead earwigs are mostly on the outside, anyway.

3:17pm: I didn’t know what to expect of the Gulf Islands Spinning Mill, but it’s a surprise to find it nestled within a kind of living agricultural history exhibit. Antique tractors rust nobly on the green. No one is around except a blacksmith, who is sure enough beating a piece of glowing metal into submission with a soundtrack of punk bagpipes. The mill is locked up, with a sign posted that recommends calling John in such a scenario. I can’t call from my American mobile here, though. The blacksmith directs me to find Barry, who oversees this place and is working on a bobcat over yonder. From Barry I learn that Bob, who gave me the green light to deliver the wool today, has gone to Ontario because his mother-in-law died. Barry calls John’s wife and learns that luckily John is on his way to the mill right now about another matter.

John arrives and shows me the other matter: the pin drafter is broken, and he’s spent all week sending photographs of various parts to the company in North Carolina that built it 70 years ago and then awaiting their suggestions about what to try next. He’s finally isolated the area where it’s jammed and hopes to have it back in action within the next week, but for the moment all he can spin is a truly Rubenesque singles. John has been running this mill for 20 years. He likes Cheviot.

My visit is brief; I need to wait until Amy comes in on Monday and takes a look at the wool so I can have a conversation with her about how best to spin it. The options are not many; it is a very little mill, after all. But it suits the modest scale of this particular adventure and I’m delighted to have seen it in person.

4:30pm: Back in downtown Ganges, I putter through the busiest area to see what’s what. Ganges is a little bigger than my town but feels familiar, brimming with summer weekend tourist traffic. I park near the Coast Guard station because I spy a bookshop and imagine this will be a good place to ask for dinner recommendations. Also, it’s called Black Sheep Books, and when you put sheep and books in the same name you’ve got me firmly in your tractor beam. Black Sheep Books is a second-hand trove of antiquarian oddities and greedily thumbed romances and everything in between. If I were feeling less hungry and more decisive I could do real damage here. After about forty happily aimless minutes I settle on In Deep, Maxine Kumin’s essays on country life, and the bookseller points me to the nearby Treehouse Café.

6:30pm: One grilled halloumi sandwich wrapped in naan with a side of kaleslaw later, I am ethnically and calorically replete. There is live music starting, but I am sleepy and also keen to veer and swoop my way back through the forest to Ruckle Park while it is still fully light.

Fence envy is a real condition, folks.

8:00pm: Back at the campground, I’ve shuttled necessities down to my tent and located the potable water supply. I pass a brace of bucks browsing at the trail’s edge. They regard me peaceably from beneath their velvety antlers. I spread my sleeping bag, gather up my knitting, and settle on a little shelf of igneous rock still warm from the sun with the waves lapping near my toes.

It’s not exactly a quiet spot; there’s a steady parade of ferries to and fro on the Vancouver run, and some of those vessels make our Washington State ferries look like bathtub toys. But the throaty purr of those big engines melds lullingly with the soundscape of the strait. I watch three families of geese ply the waters. A lustily supping otter rolls and dives and surfaces, subduing something with a lot of unmannerly chewing. He trolls the shoreline for a long while. The liquid arc of his back and the furthermore of his tail hardly leave a ripple. The sky is lit with lilac and apricot; it is also loosing a spatter of rain. I retreat to the tent to write and listen.

One anniversary mitt down, one to go.

Epilogue: It will rain all night. I will learn I’ve grown old enough to want a cushier sleeping pad, but I will be wryly thankful to have packed the extra-long impermeable ridged variety, which will have protected me perfectly from the impressive lake forming under and inside my tent even while rendering half my limbs numb by turns. In the morning I’ll laze awhile, then drive back to Ganges to hunt up breakfast at the farmer’s market, where I’ll happen upon a glorious rug woven and naturally dyed in Oaxaca. It deserves its own post.

These days

Jun 28, 2015 By Sarah in Ada, Island, Jolyon, Mothering, Outside, Uncategorized 6 Comments

Our first island day begins with blueberry muffins. The children, who chivvied my mother out of bed at six, helped mix them and are eager for me to try one from each batch. I’m late to come downstairs, sleeping until seven and then polishing off a quick work assignment while still abed, and they can’t wait any longer so I pull on yesterday’s clothes and go down unwashed, hair ahoo, for muffins and coffee and scrambled eggs. The sourdough starter we brought with us from Portland has bubbled out of its mason jar overnight, so I mix up the sponge and set it to rise.

After a shower, it’s off to town for the farmers’ market, origamied into the back of the Jetta between the car seats while my father drives so we don’t have to take a second vehicle. The children eat croissants and whole cucumbers and choose jam and flowers and fresh pasta. We play at the tiny playground beside the gazebo in Sunken Park before we have to go home for more food and a rest.

While Jolyon finally takes his nap (not in his bed, not in my bed, but on a stack of quilts on the floor in the closet), Ada plays with the dogs and trails her grandparents as they hang up the swings. I bring my knitting outside and proctor the dogs’ rumpus down at the wallow that was meant to be a pond but never quite filled. It’s a big deer print of shallow water in the woods, with real deer prints all over the muddy isthmus between the pools.

Ada joins me to watch the dogs run and splash. The sun is strong and we make for the shade of the rising ground beyond the wallow. I’m barefoot and I follow gingerly, avoiding the thistles, the trailing blackberry, and then the baked ridges where the interstices of dog toes have printed the clay and dried hard and sharp.

A tiny flash of movement on the ground I’m watching so warily—it’s a tree frog and I’m calling to my girl with such urgency that I can see she doesn’t know whether there’s wonder or trouble. She hops after the tiny frog and her quick fingers dart to encircle him. It’s her first time catching one and she’s deft but gentle, aware that he’s fragile and as keenly alive as she is.

The dogs are stampeding around the east wallow so she releases him at the edge of the western pool, which is full of his tadpole cousins, some already sprouting hind legs. She is fizzing with excitement—we both are—and suddenly there’s another tiny froglet leaping just ahead of her sandals. They’re sheltering in the deep cracks in the clay, down where the mud is still damp and cool, and we marvel at their wee black eyes and pert snouts and extraordinary tiny toes.

We wash the muddy dogs. I manage two more rows on my lace shawl before I hear wailing from the closet upstairs. I carry my sweaty, dozy boy down to view the installment of the see-saw, newly improved with handles.

We play outside. We go for a walk down the hill and back again, sampling salmonberries, thimbleberries, trailing blackberries and blackcaps. I give a lecture on nettle identification. (The dog doesn’t listen and suffers for it.) These are the bones of an education for island childhood. There are all kinds of delights if you know where to look, and one or two things not to touch.

Home again, we make salad and cook the pasta. Dad mixes gin and tonics. The kids play with the napkin holders carved in the shapes of African animals. And then it’s bedtime. We read Paul Bunyan and Horton Hatches an Egg. We sing “All God’s Critters Got a Place in the Choir” and “The Marvelous Toy.” We kiss the grandparents and try to wind down for the night.

The yawning windows admit the purling gyre of thrush song, the insistence of robins, and the occasional breath of cooler air wafting upslope through the trees. The children are a welter of damp curls and sticky limbs, still too hot and full of the day for sleep. The light lasts here at midsummer; not as it does in the simmer dim of Shetland or the neverdark of the highest latitudes, but longer than my little ones’ internal clocks can compass.

I lie down with them in turn on their twin mattresses, lightly stroke my girl’s bare arms in the way she likes. She murmurs and nuzzles and then collides with sleep, plunges abruptly into snoring, slobbering slumber. My boy is wide awake, owl eyed in the cool blue light. He makes room for me in his bed. We lie face to face and I close my eyes, setting a good example.

He whispers things into his memory bank: shards of song and science, snippets of myth and hypothesis. Some spiders live in spider webs and other spiders live in the dirt. Once I saw a tiny spider web and it had a black spider. His body was black becept his feet was dark brown. Spiders don’t have a tail. A frog doesn’t have a bottom, so how does he pee?

I peek and he is staring out the window at the sky. The divided lights and madrona branches are reflected in his wide pupils. I remember this. He has slipped backward into my own childhood and we are one three-year-old, awake long after bedtime and watching the cast of the summer evening in the woods on a little island surrounded by the sea. Quarters of hours sift by and still he’s whispering. Tickle, fickle, pickle. Dog and frog rhyme. I’m a big girl and I can help him dig a lot of clams fast so we can hurry up and go to Buck’s Harbor. Every set of utterances is stoppered with his thumb.

An hour has passed when he surrenders, drifting gently into stillness and quiet. Mt. Baker is beginning to slough the abalone colors from its flanks and the sea and sky are about to meld in the queer precise evenness of twilight. I put the heavy blue Dutch ovens in to bake the sourdough loaves for tomorrow, sit in the gathering dark in the living room and watch the lighthouses wink on across the strait. All is not really well, not with all the trouble in the world and the claws of cancer once more reaching for people I love. Perhaps this summer idyll is my way to push back against the helplessness. There’s so much I can’t do to keep my folk and other people’s equally cherished folk safe. But I can give my little ones this remarkable place, these ordinary blessed days of frogs and thimbleberries and homemade bread and the summer sea. And maybe that’s enough for right now.

A winter’s walk

Dec 25, 2014 By Sarah in Island, Jolyon, Outside 1 Comment

Dark comes early. No one wished to rush the children through opening gifts when they preferred to head immediately for the art table and draw with the “water pencils” or add those twelve new sections of track to the train set, but that meant the beautiful day was closing up shop by the time we got out in it. The littlest asked to go on the walk with the farm animals, so down to the valley we went. Usually there are some sheep on offer, complete with guard llama, but this time we saw only a handful of wary cows munching hay in the twilight. At least there was the still, cool peace of a mild December, with a sunset sky and a wooden bridge over the swampy section of the path.

Once again I regretted not having brought the real camera, as the phone just can’t capture the depth of the winter palette in this landscape — the burgundy and deep greens of the blackberry vines, the cardinal flash of Oregon grape, the cheer of the rosehips and snowberries suspended like ornaments in the hedgerows, the plump rose-lit clouds billowing up behind the disheveled firs.

“I take a picture?” my boy demanded after I made a few more lackluster attempts to catch the golden light above an old barn. Here’s his work:

Mostly he nestled against my back, against the old down coat my mother used to wear when I was little, cementing his two and a half years’ wisdom about the world: Millions of trees makes a wood. The lightness is all done and the clouds is going down. Dere tiny moon swimming frough the sky. Then he broke into “This Little Light of Mine.” And that’s a pretty good way to close out a year, carrying our little lights through the gloaming. And this is a welcome sight at the end of any walk:

Wishing you all a snug harbor among those who “love you to peace,” as my four-year-old wrote on a card to her grandparents this afternoon. And see you soon. I have some new knitting to show off at last!

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Whistling Girl Knits

whether or not the laundry is folded

Outside

Adventuring

These days

A winter’s walk