A Little Different

Apologies; I have been remiss in my duties as a virtual host in that I have failed to offer you the grand tour of these new Northwestern surroundings. To address this egregious wrong, I invite you now to explore the strange familiarity of the Northwest.

I woke up this morning to an almost-familiar Hoot! Hoot! But the sound that would have been a train whistle in my Midwestern hometown was here the bleat of an ocean-going ship. Overseas, you expect things to be stunningly different: fern-trees and kiwi-birds, Greek-alphabet shop signs and Cyrillic train schedules. On this distant shore of our own country, things are not always as familiar as it seems like they should be.

Take slugs. Instead of manageable brown ones inhabiting the cornstalks of my youth, those here grow into juicy six-inch cigars. Also, the chickadees are too small, the gulls are too big, the jays have shaved their crests, and the ducks sport mohawks. Bald eagles soar over the local Wal-Mart, whose front doors boast a first-rate view of a mountainous horizon. Rhododendron-like plants grow as skinny trees called madronas whose bark peels off in satisfying flakes. In backyards, ragged stands of cedars stretch to the clouds like gangly arbor vitae on prescription-strength Miracle-Gro. (Even these are juniors compared to the "grandfather trees" of the deep backcountry.) Below the trees, moss invades yards more militantly than dandelions. Green-rimmed waterways zigzag in every direction so that the air smells of salt and tidal mudflats instead of the algae and marshland of the Ten Thousand Lakes.

The horizon, at least, bears no Midwestern tinge. Olympic National Park, whose crags peek over the western horizon, contains no rolling hills (and very few roads), report exhausted but glowing hikers. The Cascades stretch like a ragged wall across the landscape in the east, separating the temperate rainforests of Puget Sound from the high desert of Yakima and Spokane. But, on a clear day, even these great peaks look only as tall as rough cement compared to the Mountain. When it shows itself, Rainier appears an order of magnitude more massive than everything surrounding, as if someone had erected a giant magnifying glass on the far side of Tacoma. Strange, though, how such a bulk can camouflage itself so easily: its patchy snow blends with the wispy clouds to hide the mountain as you gaze into the distance, until something clicks in your brain and your eyes suddenly register the presence of something vast.

According to Timothy Eagan's The Good Rain, Seattle gets less precipitation than New York, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, and Miami (p. 49)—it just rains more often, as mists and light sprinkles. Thunderstorms are rare. A dark horizon doesn't always indicate a menacing front. There are all-day rains, but more often, it sprinkles off and on for several days, and it's hard to predict which will happen when. But even on these overcast days, when haze obscures the mountains, the sky puts on a quiet show. The clouds are infinitely creative performing artists. Of the many kinds of clouds Waukesha sees in a month, all of them at once might gather over the Northwest, each at its own altitude, each in its own costume, as if waiting in the wings for its cue to storm into Milwaukee or pour into New York.

Some things remain familiar. As an indoctrinated practitioner of Minnesota Nice, I appreciate the series of commercials that heroize such Northwest characters as the guy who lets everyone else go first at a four-way stop (to the confusion and delay of all, including a bystanding jogger, in the ad). Kudos also go to the socks-and-sandals guy, the guy who camps under a tarp ("You bring your own blue skies"), and the Walla Walla wine wine woman woman. The sponsoring company claims that they are "A lot like you—a little different."

To this wandering Midwesterner, the Northwest is indeed a little different. And the little differences make all the difference in the world.

Trail Party

This week I discovered the Washington Trails Association (WTA). WTA organizes groups of volunteers to maintain existing trails and build new trails on public lands throughout the state. Today we worked on Taylor Mountain in the Issaquah Alps, a line of foothills that point from Seattle's Eastside into the Cascades. Most of the land on Taylor Mountain is owned by the county and is designated as a place for "passive recreation," including mountain biking, horseback riding, and, of course, hiking.

Playing in the dirt

WTA is helping to expand the trail system here. This means that WTA volunteers get to play in the mud, haul rocks around, take out aggressions on bystanding vegetation, laugh a bunch, and generally have a great time in the great outdoors. We gather at the trailhead at 8:30 (after driving for an hour toward a Mt. Rainier whose snows are tinged pink by the dawn) and work, more or less, until 2:30. A bucket of candy is passed around at 10:30, picnic lunch at noon, and breathers as often as you wish. Hard hats are in fashion (and if you join five work parties, you get a personalized one of your very own as a self-serving thank-you gift). The WTA supplies the tools—shovels, grub hoes, rakes, loppers, buckets—and once the crew leader outlines the plan, we get to work cutting brush, moving dirt, uprooting shrubs, redistributing rocks, and digging ditches. Turns out there's a lot more to building a durable, water-resistant trail than trimming a path through the underbrush.

At the end of the work day, we gather in the parking area, muddy and spent but in the high spirits of those who have completed a physically demanding but deeply satisfying task. Someone produces a Coleman cooler of steaming-hot washcloths for our hands and faces, and someone else pours plastic cups of hot apple cider to go with a bin of chocolate chip cookies. On these sunny springtime days, we stand around chatting for as long as possible before returning to the real world and its rush-hour traffic.

"Boot-sucking mud-holes"

I've joined two work parties so far. On Tuesday, we began with an abandoned road whose gravel surface had turned into a mud-clogged drainage ditch. (The WTA website uses the term "boot-sucking mud-holes" to describe trails like this one in their pre–work-party state.) By afternoon, we had prodded it into a somewhat wider dirt path edged with the suggestion of a rocky gutter.

The ten-person crew consisted almost entirely of retired men. Flannel and suspenders were conspicuous. One WTA veteran, a small man with a round, grinning, boyish face, had just turned 80 and worked just as hard as I did on the trail. Most of the crew had gotten to know each other through years of trail work and entertained me by trading wisecracks and wordplays and ridiculous stories (including something about "old-growth salmonberries").

The forest transformed

Today (Friday) I returned to the same stretch of trail. Trail crews had been out during the two intervening days, and it was amazing to see the trail's transformation. Where there had been a sketched-out gutter and a rough path, now there existed a well-formed and rockless canal next to a cobbled road. The walkway had been lined with watermelon-sized rocks and filled with fist-sized rocks to give it the appearance of a quaint country lane. A future crew would smooth a bed of sandy soil on top of the rocks to create an even, solid surface that drains instead of turning to mud. The trick is to remove any organic matter, which absorbs water, decays, and turns to muck. This painstakingly built but hidden structure underlies all trails where there is risk that water might seep into the trailbed.

Through the woods

Our job today was to create a gentle switchback from the cobbles through the forest to another trail section downhill. We ploughed through salmonberry bushes and blackberry tendrils, raked away many inches of leaf litter, pried large rocks out of the underlying soil, hacked at inconvenient roots, and moved a lot of dirt. My task was to shovel dirt that others had loosened into a satisfyingly large mound.

This time the women outnumbered the men on the 16-person crew. One sported French-tipped nails, another wore a fashionable hat when her head wasn't covered by her green plastic helmet. Another proudly displayed curly white hair and looks like she could have retired years ago but still kept busy as a physical therapist and avid hiker.

I'll ache tomorrow, but now I feel great.

Browsing the Classifieds

Courtesy of the Kitsap Sun:

Classified ad:
"Wanted: 1 pair
breeding Lovebirds"

Winter Found

I found my winter: it's in Canada.

They commandeered our ice and snow to use in the 2010 Winter Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies. As a native of the Upper Midwest and a stalwart fan of cold seasons, the icy theme of this year's Games felt homey: bright white stars in a long, cold night; sparkling snow flurries; and, of course, the flaming ice crystal that is the cauldron of the Olympic Flame.

Other aspects more closely reflected my newest adoptive home. Vancouver is only about three and a half hours from Port Orchard (two and a half from Seattle). What we call the "Northwest" is only a thin border away from southwest Canada. We share a time zone and weather patterns. (It rained all day, here and there.) We both enjoy giant trees, Indian motifs, a mountainous horizon; we have in common an awe of orcas and a fondness for salmon. (Port Orchard even has its very own totem pole, on the waterfront next to the public library. And on every Puget Sound ferryboat are posters explaining how closely boaters are allowed to approach the orcas.)

And yet that thin border has some effect. I wanted to apply for Canadian citizenship by the time the poet described his homeland as the place whose people are renowned for their pleases and thank yous.

But before the echoes of the poet's words settled, NBC cut to a commercial for Marriage Ref—Welcome back to the U.S., where we enjoy watching celebrities make fun of peoples' marriages. So much for please and thank you.

Addendum to the End of Winter

Note that these photos were taken on February 4. Around the neighborhood, the heather is in full bloom, scraggly cushions of tiny pinkish-purple or white flowers, and crocuses are poking up through the leaf litter, opening their flowers in a kind of squinty way, as if they were still bleary from hibernation. The local outdoor batting cage is set to reopen later this month. Soon state parks and public restrooms will welcome another season's visitors. For a while I wondered why parks closed for the "winter," seeing as no snowdrifts or health-threatening temperatures prevent people from walking around. Maybe they close the restrooms on the off chance that the pipes might freeze, and city codes forbid people gathering in places without adequate facilities? Any other ideas?

The End of Winter as We Know It

It was a beautiful day in Washington. A warm breeze smelled as green as summer. Outside the grocery store are flats of primroses to plant. Fuzzy pussywillow buds are cracking open their protective shells, and on other bushes, tiny, wrinkled leaflets are slowly unfurling into leaves. Even my spring jacket is hanging unused in the closet. And it’s January.

This seems to be business as usual in the Northwest. On New Year’s, after the local news team covered the fireworks exploding off the Space Needle, their weatherman predicted the “end of winter” for the year. I assumed it was an exaggeration or wishful thinking, or maybe a forecast courtesy of a particularly far-sighted groundhog. But here I am on January 26, hearing song sparrows singing against a muddy but green backdrop that could pass for late March in the Midwest.

That’s not to say that snow and ice are impossible here. We did get a week of sub-zero temps a few months ago (which a chilled classmate declared “crazy cold”). And even today, my sister occasionally has to scrape frost from her windshield when she drives home from work in the wee hours. Proper snow falls in the mountains, although both the Olympics and the Cascades are usually obscured by clouds and a blue haze. Locals even hold a polar bear plunge. But it’s disappointing to hear that numbers were low this year because of the rain.

The North Kitsap Herald sent a reporter into the rain and waves to describe a Northwestern polar bear plunge (Bainbridge Island is a well-to-do island in Kitsap County, northeast of Port Orchard and west of Seattle):

Brrringing in the New Year | 2010 Polar Bear Plunge