CLALLAM AT BAY

2011-12-09T19:54:00.000-08:00

The Clallam Bay totem Returns. More details soon. Click link to go to Youtube channel, for sharing and comments.

2011-10-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

ONION CAKES

Onion cakes with sweet-and-sour sauce.

Lots of people up here have traditional, inherited, or invented recipes, from stick salmon (split and held open by sticks for roasting by an open fire) to potato casserole to wild berry cobbler, or just a mess of butter-fried oyster mushrooms, or chanterelle soup.

Recently at local potlucks - with our growing source of exotic foods at the Sunset West Co-op - we've been noshing on things like hot tofu pockets and edamame (steamed green soybean pods). A batch of kelp pickles found an excited gourmand in a young Coast Guardsman who remembered them being prepared by his grandmother.

Cooking from scratch helps in a tight economy. West enders, who have always had more raw, wild and rough food than cash, know that already.

I'm not a great cook; but I came from a place like this, and I can just turn anything I find into something good. Call me a Poor People's Cook; my family couldn't afford to throw anything away, and if you grow up eating those foods, you never lose the taste for them.

I just taught somebody at the food bank that those frozen vegetables and salmon burgers make the base for a delicious salmon chowder. A box of cheap macaroni-and-cheese is transformed into something special at the campground when a cup full of chopped young, fresh nettles are added to the pot. Oatmeal and dried date pieces added to biscuit mix make a robust, tasty bannock or soda bread, so good with hot coffee in the morning. And let's not forget blackberry wine.

Anyway, here's my contribution for surviving in a rural economy, especially if you need something different for a potluck.The Onion Cakes originated as a simpler version of the traditional Chinese coiled-dough green-onion cake. It's pictured here packed up in a bamboo steamer with sweet-and-sour sauce, ready to go to the Hallowe'en parties at the Clallam Bay Inn and the Three Sisters of Clallam art gallery.

First of all, I'm not giving a detailed recipe for experienced cooks. YOU know how to make biscuits, so just replace the "box biscuits" with your own. Throwing a couple eggs into the mix doesn't hurt, either, for binding and crispness.

So here's the "recipe:" Mix up a big batch of box mix biscuits. Chop up any kind of savory (not sweet) onions finely (about a cup to every three cups mix) and and egg. Stir until everything is just moistened; too much stirring will make the cakes tough. Fry up in tiny cakes in fat just hot enough to sizzle without spitting, flipping once to brown both sides. This works great on the wood stove as it heats up the house in the morning.

The sweet-and-sour sauce is apple-cider vinegar, sugar, water, flour, a dash of salt and red food coloring (just for the pretty), simmered and stirred until it forms a piquant sauce. Mix it to taste. Don't lean over the pan too close to taste; hot vinegar fumes will evaporate right into your sinuses. Ask me how I know.

These are really good with beef fat, but since they're for a party I've used a canola/olive oil mix. You never know if Jewish, Muslim or Hindu friends will show up, even out here (or maybe, with the growing tourism, especially out here), and we all have veggie friends, here where there are so many fine wild plant foods to gather and enjoy.

I make these cakes from scratch, and use fine whole wheat bread flour, to lend a nutty flavor. The cakes and the sauce get better as they cool, so you can make them up in the morning and take them to the party in the evening.

Call it my version of frybread. Everybody's got a recipe of their own for that - and they're all good.

2011-10-23T18:06:00.000-07:00

Taking the Day Off To Play Hunter/Gatherer/Farmer

From left: Mushrooms (Orange Chanterelles, pear-shaped puffballs, Oregon gomphidius, crested coral), Jerusalem artichokes, giant barnacles, potatoes. Not pictured, but gathered the same day: eggs and raspberries.

Northwest giant barnacles. Steam 'em; they taste like crabs. Well, they ARE crabs.

2011-09-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

The 2011 Blackberry Convulsion!

Yes, time to haul out and pick all we need for the year - or can stand to process. We're after the non-native Himalyas, cuz we need the juice for the wine. So we take along the loppers, and are merciless, pounding down the hard-spreading commercial variety, and giving trees and native berries a better chance. Yes, going after non-natives gives us a chance to exercise the human greed-head gene while assisting the natives. Might as well use it and work it out. The whole process will take three days.

Day 1: Picking.

Himalyas in the bucket - non-native, so can pick our brains out. So to speak.

It takes only a few minutes to fill a bucket. The Himalayas hang on the vine so thickly, and get as big as a man's thumb. We have no scruples about taking loppers to the new-growth vines, which can be two inches across, with thorns that could puncture a tire. Besides that, it helps the bears get in later, when they come back for their feed. Lots of black-bear berry scat and plowed areas of vines show where they've been working. We figure we might as well return the favor, and open up new-ripening masses of berries for them. They can probably do it themselves, but isn't it nice to know somebody's been thoughtful enough to do it for you? Less work and annoyance, more hibernating fat.

Dan done picking, taking his first chance to gobble blackberries like the bears.

We don't eat while we're picking -- keeps us working hard. Then it's time for the Great Blackberry Gorge! Nom nom nom.

A cooler full of blackberries -- about fifty pounds.

Day 2: Winemaking.

Berries all squashed and strained, first steps in wine-making.

Rich and light versions in my bathroom, caps on lightly to allow bubbling gas to escape. The lighter jugs one the right have less juice, for a milder, more refreshing flavor. The ones on the left will be luscious. We even had enough fresh juice left over to pour into a bottle of red wine - scrumptious!

Day 3: Canning.

Final canning of leftover mash. Cobblers, pies for weeks!

The trick to making Himalayas taste like wild ones - add a little lemon-juice and freshly-grated nutmeg. The wine-squeezing gets rid of the excess juice that makes the jam too runny. Yes, if we had a tribe with us, we could process enough for winter. As it is, we hope this takes us through Christmas! Whew; all done until next year.

2011-08-11T13:01:00.000-07:00

Alders Aren't Native?

There are some people running around up here claiming the alder isn't a native tree. One of them is even stripping out all the young alders from under a Douglas Fir in a beach area, claiming the alders are sucking all the nitrogen away from the fir, while letting the same ground be taking over by wild rose plants.

Say what? Alders fix nitrogen. They're native. I think the people doing this must be either playing a logging company propaganda game, or else they've misread Vancouver's journals, which state that alders here "resemble" English alders.

Somebody else poisoned all the alders out of a garden stand of man-planted Douglas Firs on the way out of town. Everybody up here says they want to live "in the woods," but then why do so many of them keep trying to make it look like the Seattle arboretum?

2011-08-08T09:34:00.000-07:00

ALMOST BLACKBERRY TIME

It's almost time to make blackberry wine.... rubbing hands... they always ripen on my birthday, or did when I was a kid. Here, it's about a week after.

Blackberries... which we can't use gloves with because we can't nibble off a handful before working arm back out of the Iron Maiden of vines.

Oh, who else (female) here ever went berry picking without a bra and leaned stupidly into a bank of Himalayas?

Our neighbor had a bunch of the little wild berries come up next to her porch, and has already picked more than her husband found in the woods in four trips.

Speaking of berries, the Thimbleberries on the side of our road are popping out now. My favorite berry; they taste like a cross between raspberries and roses. Some people think they're insipid, and it takes a lot to make jam, and then they lose that special flavor. So I just stand and snarf them like a happy monkey in the long meadow. This is how we're supposed to eat, anyway. I can't reach into the back bushes -- or I don't feel like it -- so I'm not eating anybody else's share; there are so many berries up here now, every bird and mammal and insect has more than they want. It's why we're putting off cleaning the outside of the house for the year, until the birds stop bombing the very pale lavender paint.

The signs of spring and summer. Salmon-berry bird begins to sing when the salmon-berries ripen, and goes silent as the thimbleberries cap red and juicy. And the house gets decorated with purplish splotches.

2011-08-07T14:39:00.000-07:00

SMOKING SALMON

Right on Highway 112 in Clallam Bay. Admittedly, they're the pinks they gotta move -- but they're probably still fresher and nicer than any pinks you can find.

Nice, clean fish.

Split, dry-rubbed with my homemade sea salt, lemon juice and cracked pepper.

Heads and a few inches of the tails shanks microwaved for the cats. Gotta cool!

Salmon wrapped in towels, placed in refrigerator for a couple days, to cure and seep out the excess liquid.

Rinsed of excess rubbing, allowed to dry in the sun a couple hours, and ready to grill.

Grilling over grass, harvested from a gasoline-and-chemical-free yard, dried and soaked in salty rinse water. Yes, that's a stop sign and a washing-machine tub.

Skin browned, flipped to smoke meat on first piece.

Smoke rousing up on the last two pieces, meat-side-down.

All smoked, finishing the skin brown. SMOKEEEDDDD SALMONNNNNN.

2011-08-07T13:39:00.000-07:00

SOCIAL EXPERIMENT

Dan and I pick up the Clallam Bay beach as we're walking, or at least the mile or so on the east side of the Clallam River. We're not civic-minded; we just don't want to look at it. We've hauled off all manner of crap over the years, from tiny to huge, from unknown scrap of plastic to bags of human shit to old rusty lead pipe to an ancient rusty compressor to a complete toilet (we had to break it up and carry it away in pieces).

Dan with all the garbage we found on the entire beach behind him. Now. In 2003 when we moved here? Just imagine.

Yesterday, in passing the Clallam River park bridge, we placed some garbage at the head of the attached ramp, to pick up when we got back, to dump, as we've been given permission, in the park dumpster. I make no assumptions about whether any of the following people thought a raggedy chunk of fibreglass and a broken tin roof fragment belonged to anybody or was other than junk:

Three catch-and-release trout fishermen. Stepped over it.

Two blimpish white boys who gave us a dirty look on the beach (we have black hair). Went around it.

Three aware-looking teenagers. Probably not aware of the junk.


The other side of the river, where we normally can't reach, not even at high tide in summer, now. Somebody on that end -- and I suspect the owners of the Three Sisters of Clallam Art Gallery and their friends and family -- is keeping it as clean as we keep our end. Somebody on the road to Slip Point is picking up everything we used to pick up. The worst pickup on the beach is found 100 feet from the end of the bridge, during the summer. The attachment is removed during the winter. Draw your own conclusions - and say "Thank you," if you know those people.

2011-08-07T10:09:00.000-07:00

SMITH TOTEM POLE NEEDS REFURBISHING

That's the name of the artist who created this pole. I am blanking on his first name (if you know it I'll add it), but his work is very recognizable -- I impressed a Port Angeles pawnshop store owner when I recognized a new piece in his store. I'd recommend buying his art if you find it; the native art market is not going away, and it's not going to get any cheaper.

The mall totem, originally commissioned by Clallam Bay's Olson family -- represents the Makah "crest" -- Thunderbird and man on a killer whale. Or close, anyway (totem symbols are very personal; you have to ask the artist and the family that commissions it).

As you can see, the mini-mall is getting an upgrade by the owner, in preparation for the Sunsets West Co-op going in as anchor tenant (don't worry; the Quarter Store isn't going away. Supposedly. I take anything the co-op says with a grain of salt. Heck, I take anything anybody tells me up here with a cup of salt; if they haven't got an agenda, they're rumor-mad; it's a form of story-telling as sport).

The intent in the condition of the crest pole MIGHT be to allow it to age and decay naturally. If not, it could use some refreshing. Only by the artist, please, or permission of his family.

One of the artist's poles is in the harbor at Port Orchard, Washington. Another in Bremerton, Washington, burnt when the apartment building it adorned went up in flames.

2011-08-06T08:09:00.000-07:00

Forks and The Weekly, Twilight and Immigrants

Okay, so far on this situation. An immigrant man was killed during a Border Patrol stop outside Forks. The Forks mayor was startled when fans of the Twilight books and movies were horrified and started writing and showing up (in "droves" -- but in Forks that means there's 50 or so girls and their bored but patient parents in couple of Twilight stores and the van).

Local papers claimed the story hit The New York Times because Forks was so important now. Maybe so, but not in a way they may want to be.

The mayor of Forks was startled. I recognized an obvious outcome to the local Invader Americans' terror of the Other. I know the writer-and-fan culture from long experience, just from my books. So I posted a head's-up on this blog.

Seattle's Weekly was next to write an article about the incident.

The Forks Forum is a little free country weekly I freelance for. because, to survive, everybody up here has six hats. I often have to tell people I'm interviewing that I'm willing to leave out bits of information that would get them in trouble with the county -- and the county doesn't want to know either. They know people have to play with loopholes to survive up here. My line is, "This isn't an exposé." So, yeah, sometimes my reports are not quite as complete as they might be, just to keep the local businessfolk, volunteers and artists out of trouble. Nobody wants to know; this is just a restaurant-and-post-office handout.

Of the paper's admiration for my work I have no illusions -- I'm the person who saves them gasoline or emergency time up here. They don't pay much, but they pay their bills, and they don't keep me in the dark. I try to return the favor.

The editor wrote an editorial and posted the cover picture, interpreting what the Weekly did as an attempt to grow its readership. This is probably a publisher decision (for whatever reason) and my editor is a good, quiet workhorse. I figgered I might as well put in my two cents so he'd know where I stand. Least I could do -- the guy is decent to me.

So I dropped him an email:

"Um... just a passing note (with the recognition that editors gotta listen to the publisher):The Weekly isn't a "free tabloid." It's got some of the best investigative journalism around, and it's only "free" because it gets a LOT of advertising, especially from the club, band and entertainment scene. It pays its people quite well, too. They don't need Twilight to up their readership -- their readership really doesn't follow the girl's romance market. Their readership makes fun of Twilight, when they think of it at all (which is not fair, because we all have our manias and movies). The movie at San Diego Comicon would take up its own booth and fandom in the midst of a literal small city of booths.At best, The Weekly using the logo to ironically introduce a "dark underbelly" article. At worst, they're making fun of it.

The Border Patrol isn't going to scare anybody outside the area with the "illegal immigrant" boogieman. Least of all the Twilight readership, who are all about the girl getting hooked on the unusual stranger. The Weekly people are like bloodhounds -- they can find out everything, and they WILL.Many Hispanics also have the blood of native peoples in them. It's gonna happen..."

He knows this, but papers here are the toys of the publishers, and an editor's gotta eat, too.

Just sayin'. We have real, live tribes up here, and we're not the only ones. The first time an "illegal" immigrant raises his or her hand and claims tribal membership, all hell is going to break loose. This is not over. It's been four (five?) hundred years coming.

My readers know how I write -- I know a snowball and an avalanche when I see one.

2011-07-31T09:56:00.000-07:00

On The Beach

Just some photos of wandering on the beach, limbering up after painting the house and getting exercise. It's usually a pebble beach, but in the summer we get a collection of sand -- and the other end is sand, by the river.

It's the "Injun's fault" there are no fish -- not the out-of-town fishermen who flip lethal Styrofoam bait packets into the water. And we never find these things until summer. It's also the Injun's fault there are baby diapers by the side of the road all summer -- I guess the Injuns stay in Neah Bay except in the winter, huh? (Where would we white people be without the Injuns to blame?)

Gull tracks! The California and Heermann's gulls are relaxing on the beach right now, splashing and swimming in the river. The river used to get filthy during the summer because the mouth would close up due to stupid human engineering (more Stupid White People Tricks). Now it's found a more natural mouth it looks like it might flow all summer and stay clean. Those are my fancy toes -- in the summer I do too much sloppy and dirty with my hands for polish, so my flip-flopped or bare feet get all the attention. You see this with the Makah -- the women get fancy feet at celebrations, with polish, cool flip-flops and sandals, even jewelry and tattoos. Kind of leads to Shoe Envy at the Neah Bay graduations.

Wading pools in the Clallam River! My favorite thing in the world on a beach or stream is those very shallow, clear wading pools. It's a kid thing. I just adore it. Now there are all these immaculate, clear, clean pools to splash in. But watch the kids -- there are some deep holes in this river.

July 30, 2011, and the river mouth is still open. It doesn't have to fight its way past the high embankment on the other side of the wooded "island." See? Stop fiddling with nature, and she rights herself, like a good sailboat. It will be like having a whole 'nother river up here for fish runs -- one in the summer as well as the winter.

You snooze, you lose. I spotted these oyster mushrooms on a log. I squatted down and stuffed my pockets. On the path, I ran into a guy we'd seen on the beach, running back with a plastic bag. I asked him if he was going to collect garbage like we were (it's becoming something of a hobby thang up here). He said, "Something," and kept on. We realized he'd seen the oysters -- and gone back for a bag. And he was wearing a hat! Mushroom hunters are ruthless -- all I left was the mycelium.

2011-07-25T09:17:00.000-07:00

At the Photosynthesis Festival:

2011-07-18T22:04:00.000-07:00

Kelp Pickles

Down at the bar, for some reason the subject of old-time food came up. Somebody mentioned kelp pickles. A guy's eyes lit up: "My mom used to make the best kelp pickles!"

Caught a big bullwhip kelp (= caught on the hook, dragged in, grumbling). Decided, "Screw it, I'm making kelp pickles."

Recipe:

Take a big bullwhip kelp -- or a hunk of one. For me, the beach and water is a refrigerator, so I just pick up what I need when I'm low on pickles (or fish, or scallops). Note: this piece is too big and old! Get a piece that is no bigger around than 3/4 of an inch. The following pickles are too tough to be used for anything but relish -- but they sure taste good!

Chop into bite-size pieces, including the bulb. Pour boiling water over it (turns bright green!), let set 10 minutes. This kills the enzymes so the kelp won't go slimey.

Drain.

Mix some pickling spices (black pepper, whole cilantro, dill), some sugar, some apple-cider vinegar. If you're making garlic dill, leave out all but a dash of sugar, add garlic, tumeric, dill, black pepper, tarragon, instead of the sweet mix. Oh, you know how.

Heat to simmer, pour over kelp pieces.

When cool, bottle and put in fridge for a couple weeks. Really nice. My neighbor gagged at the idea of kelp pickles because she'd had them and they were nasty. Bet the person who made them didn't BLANCH them! Note: I haven't tried to heat-seal them yet. If you do, please let us know! Suddenly, everybody wants a taste.

Photo credit: Roberta Gregory (whom I'm teaching layered color in GIMP while I'm writing a pickle blog; I am such a techno-hick).

2011-07-11T18:59:00.000-07:00

Salmon Berry Bird singing; now it really is summer.

If you can't hear this bird in this summer, you're probably not really in the Pacific Northwest woods.

2011-06-29T12:58:00.001-07:00

Cloud With A Mountain In It

Was that or was that NOT a helicopter going "OH SHIT!" out of the fog and nearly bashing into Bear Kill Ridge behind us yesterday? Dan says he thinks it was. It was kinda duck and cover around here as we wondered how many helicopters and where the hell they were. Classic Cloud With A Mountain In It.

2011-06-25T21:35:00.000-07:00

Deer crossing the Clallam River at low tide.

2011-06-23T18:41:00.000-07:00

Forks, Washington, lets the border patrol sit on the highway outside its town and try to catch naughty Hispanics.

Forks is the scene of the Twilight novels.

The novels portray Indians as cool people.

Lower-income Hispanics tend to be Indios, or First Nations.

The New York Times reported on a murder of a local Hispanic man.

Now the Forks mayor is wringing his hands and going, "Whad we do? Whad we do?" as the nasty emails from appalled fans come in.

Maybe they'll think again before letting the border patrol run through town like wild dogs.

2011-05-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

Ancient Fish Traps

Finally took advantage of a low tide to scramble over the rocks to get to the fish traps below the Spring Tavern.

This is the photo I took earlier the same day. It's somewhat ironic, that this ancient technology is framed by modern power line.

Fish traps were often built at the mouths of rivers. The Clallam River, now that folks have stopped messing with it, is gradually working its mouth westward along the shore. Could it be heading back to an old mouth that came out across the fish traps? It's just now uncovered a set of big rocks that have been under a sand ridge for decades.

The right-hand trap is rather shallow, and quite weedy. The left-hand one, however, is clean, knee to thigh deep, with a bed of clean sand. There were no fish in either of them. If they were closed off, they wouldn't threaten any fish that were ever trapped in them, because they're full of water, even at low tide, and the water is deep enough in the left one to remain cool between tides. The left one would be rather delightful as a wading/swimming pool for the little kids.

However, they're really only accessible, at least easily, by canoe, or down a rock slide toward Sekiu. Over there is what appears to be another fish trap, but with larger boulders. The ones around the Spring traps look as though five to six people could have moved them, using fulcrum points and small logs. It's definitely a community, or CSDI, project (Chief Said Do It).

I'm sorry, I'm hanging around too many First Nations folks up here, and their sense of humor is rubbing off on me. Which is kind of like my Dad's, who grew up in Colorado, and picked it up there. As in:

What did Custer say when he saw all those Indians coming around the bend at the little Big Horn?

"What's wrong with them? They were all right at the dance last night."

2011-05-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

Old River Bed, Old Glass

This piece of old glass came out of the ground when the Clallam River ran through an older mouth.

Top of a lamp, perhaps? From the old cabins or houses (differing reports) that used to stand on the river? All that remains of them is the occasional worn brick. Dan and I found all of the old rusted pipe and pulled the last of it out at least three years ago. This year we dragged out and dumped the old rusted compressor.

One of our very nice bartenders at the Clallam Bay Inn, to whom we showed the piece our way back from the beach, said I should post it.

Yesterday we found a piece of an old flivver tire, but in condition not so good.

2011-04-08T13:18:00.000-07:00

Deer tracks on the beach. Out for the morning wander, probably to lick up salt. Or like us, just to enjoy the sunshine and mess around buy the river. Wild animals do what we were all meant to do: eat, sleep, enjoy themselves and try to stay out of trouble.

Speaking of trouble, yesterday I had my binoculars trained on a river otter, that was happily gobbling and throwing around chunks of fish. It suddenly stared at me, then - and there's no other way to describe this -- did a double-take and ducked under water, as my tiny view filled up with adult bald eagle. The eagles are hatching chicks right now, and no doubt it would have taken fish or otter, whichever course it could have pulled onto the table.

Day before yesterday, we walked in a wide arc around a gull. It was settled down on the sand in the chill mist. It looked sick or old. But it was out of the wind; any shelter, no matter how low or inconsiderable, makes a huge difference when you have no place else to go.

Yesterday we found its dismembered and plucked body. Today I picked up one of its wings and placed it in a tangle of dried roots, out of the sand, in the wind where it belonged.

The Clallam River changed its course this winter, back to its original bed, now that people have stopped trying to open it too early with bulldozers. Now most of the really nice sand beach is on our side of the river during the winter.

That's Vancouver Island beyond the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Bear Kill Ridge and Slip Point on the right. Or Radio ridge, because of the Coast Guard and Verizon towers. Every generation has its own names; we call Mussolini Head, on the stony beach around the ridge, "Octopus Rock."

Dan and our Junk Tree. We drag heavier items to this buried tree, by the end of the closed bridge (right). When the bridge is opened every spring by the Lion's Club, the heavy garbage is dragged to the dumpster in the park. Usually the Lion's Club beats us to it. Bless their souls.

2011-03-31T10:24:00.000-07:00

CLAMS AND OIL LAMP - STUFF FROM THE BEACH

We found an oil lamp on the beach.

There are a lot of rocks with holes in them, from where pebbles have been worn out of the hard bedrock. This one had a perfect hollow connected to a hole that allowed the use of a cotton wick. The first photo shows the rock by itself, with the 1/2-teaspoon of oil it can hold. I think the Clallam people who had their village on this beach here used stone oil lamps with seal or bear oil; who knows if this is a worn-down remnant of someone's household lamp? I pretend it is, without making any historical claims. We keep the beach clean; it's the least we can do.

This is the lamp propped upright by another pebble in a Pyrex bowl, filled with plain vegetable oil. The bowl has a delicate pattern around the rim, which projects this beautiful little sunburst. It uses about a quarter-inch of oil in 12 hours.

This basket of shells helps us identify different species. From left to right, they're: Eastern Softshell, Cockle, Native and Butter. Butter clams hold onto Red Tide toxins for two years, so it's important to know which is which.

2011-02-28T08:07:00.000-08:00

CHICKENS AND SKIN MONKEYS

So scared the chickens were not going to be all right in the bitter cold -- but they're out there eating popcorn for a treat & drinking the freshly-replaced water AM & PM, & still laying. The crows insist on their own big bowl of popcorn too, and swear at me if they don't get it. Whadaya gonna do? Now I'm a bird flunky as well as a cat servant.

I was worried about the poor cold chickens and was trying to figure out how to warm them, when I realized if I did, they'd lose their natural resistance to cold. It's like losing your night purple after using a light in the dark. The best cure for cold for outside animals is lots and lots of good food, so they can lay on lots of fat.

Wild animals all have houses; their own tough skins. WE lived in deserts, lost all our hair, had to wear clothes against the sun. It must explain why nudity is a sin in the middle-eastern religions; it's DANGEROUS to run around naked in equatorial deserts.

The more "purebred" Makah up here run around in sleeveless t-shirts on miserable, cold, rainy days. It's the 70-degree days in summer that make these big guys miserable.

People have asked me, "What about coyotes?" Have you never heard of the miracle of chicken wire? The local Cooper's Hawk skidded to a hover over the cage and we pointed and laughed; you've never seen a hawk drool. This is the same bird that got into a neighbor's cage and ripped the head off a chicken. She'd left a hole the size of a football in the chicken wire.

If we're going to raise farm animals near predators, we have to be aware of these animals' versatility. In a film taken with a camera on the back of birds of prey, we see what the Cooper's largest relative -- the goshawk -- does with small spaces at speed (there's an ad, but it only lasts a few seconds). Makes me wonder if people who have been animating movies about flying on dragons haven't referred to the real thing.

Remember, if a predator gets your domestics, it's your fault. Don't think you can ultimately solve it by killing stuff; everybody doing that has decimated natural animal populations. And if you're raising stuff to sell to eat and taking shortcuts by killing wildlife -- what ELSE won't you take a shortcut with? And why should I buy your stuff?

2011-02-08T18:21:00.000-08:00

TRACKING FOR LAZY PEOPLE

On our long beach walk today, found two sets of deer prints wandering in the sand. Followed them to a broken bank, which is where I wanted to go anyway as the easiest way to get to the marsh and walk over to see how deep the ford in the river is. Or what looked like a ford, opposite what might be the very rotten remains of the old wooden bridge.

After discovering the ford was quite deep, and that a young Douglas Fir was using one of the old bridge posts as a nurse log, I continued along the river shore, and noticed the deer prints continuing ahead of me. Reaching the end of the mini-peninsula in the river, I started back up what I thought would be the easiest way -- and looked into the face of the deer. Who seemed to say, "So, now what?"

After saying "Hi there!" I turned around and headed back through the underbrush and trees, picking the easiest trail. Or as easy as it gets, ducking through Devil's club and brambles. Upon reaching the other side of the peninsula, I spotted what looked like an easy break in the brambles that would allow me to scramble back down the cliff. There I found another broken bank -- and at the bottom, imprinted in the mud of the lagoon shore, more deer prints.

Evidently people and deer all go along the lines of least resistance.

A Cooper's hawk leapt into the air ahead of me, with what looked like a rat in its claws. We'd seen a stripped crow's wing on the beach earlier this week. More bloody bones on the sand told us the hawk had been eating well.

2011-02-03T11:51:00.000-08:00

TYPOES AND COWBOYS

This is what a typo in a browser URL can lead to: crazies in the woods.

Makin' money and acting nuts in the woods the GREEN way. Your comments (and laughter) welcome.

If anybody had any brains they'd harvest the knotweed, organize with Ric Polumbo in Clallam Bay to take it to Seattle with his fish, and make a mint selling Mountain Vegetables to the Japanese restaurant and overseas trade.

They gotta do SOMETHING to stave off the developers and get the cancer chemicals out of the water.

2011-02-03T08:57:00.000-08:00

TOO MUCH TECHNO-HICK

Okay, this may seem too much in my playing pioneer, but:

1. It's not as hard as it sounds.

2. It's incredibly cheap.

3. It gets rid of all that plastic you have to pay so much to dispose of in packaging.

4. Clothes come out soft and sweet and -- if you mix 3/4 cup soap gel with a quart of water, you get a dish-soap that will soak the crap off anything. No more scrubbing ANYTHING.

5. It makes a helluva lot of soap out of about a cup and a 1/2 of ingredients. Double it and don't make soap for a month.

Those of you with sensitivities in you or animals may want to try it. It's really super.

Homemade Laundry Soap

1/3 bar Fels Naptha or other type of soap, as listed above

½ cup washing soda

½ cup borax powder

~You will also need a small bucket, about 2 gallon size~

Grate the soap and put it in a sauce pan. Add 6 cups water and heat it until the soap melts. Add the washing soda and the borax and stir until it is dissolved. Remove from heat. Pour 4 cups hot water into the bucket. Now add your soap mixture and stir. Now add 1 gallon plus 6 cups of water and stir. Let the soap sit for about 24 hours and it will gel. You use ½ cup per load.

2011-02-02T11:41:00.000-08:00

GOING POSTAL

At least the mail isn't in a pile in the woods. YET. I know somebody who had that one.

We've got a situation up here, where occasionally the mail goes insane. I've got all my billing on email notification and payment now, which loses the post office more money, but whadaya gonna do?

Some neighbors have solved the problem by transferring to another post office in another town, but we really don't need to lose the post office here, especially for people without vehicles.

Rather than transferring your accounts to the other town, call the USPS and start a case file on lost mail, bills and/or medication. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

The phone number is:
Call 1-800-ASK-USPS®
(1-800-275-8777)
M-F - 8:00am-8:30pm ET
Sat - 8:00am-6:00pm ET
Sunday - Closed

Or go to the site.

2011-01-30T12:18:00.000-08:00

ELEPHANT SEAL MOULTING SEASON

Yearling elephant seal on the Clallam Bay Beach. Gender unknown.

They were hunted down to about 100 individuals, according to the Marine Mammal Stranding System station in Joyce. They're in recovery, but they're very inbred.

So I waited until it slid back down off the beach this morning before posting this. First elephant seal I've ever seen in the wild.

2011-01-20T09:55:00.000-08:00

HOW WE ALL USED TO BE

Up here is seeming more and more as I read accounts of America, at least as viewed by its citizens, in 1910. America, in its own opinion, was still young and vibrant and faultless, and God had put all those trees and animals here to harvest for his children's good. The main newspaper has a Women's Section; one almost expects the people being interviewed to wear daytime corsets and picture hats.

John Aubrey in his Brief Lives writes, "My grandfather Lyte told me that at one Lord Majors shew there was the Representation of the Creation of the World, and writt underneath AND ALL FOR MAN." (sic)

At a rather nice little pastry shop in Forks (from the North, take the first right after the True Value) , I was having fun with a tiny blackberry cheesecake and a rather ferocious cup of coffee, and the amusing gentleman who hangs out helping with the bread was discussing the locals ("gossiping," is, I believe, the correct term among those of us who practice the art). He complained that The Park (Olympic Peninsula National Park) was denying The People their rights on the land. To paraphrase the conversation:

"When these parks were established, it was for the People."

I answered, "Well, maybe it's time we rethink how we view what's left of our wild lands. We'll be extinct someday, especially at the rate we're going, and these creatures need a refuge until we're gone. Maybe it's time we lock up this land and stay out of it, so these creatures can survive. We at least owe them that."

He didn't say a lot after that. He seemed to be thinking. I can't tell if he was upset, weighing the idea, reviewing the future, or all of it at once. I'd had too much rather good coffee; what did I know?

I tend to think about whether there's enough for everybody, including my fellow creatures, before I start grabbing. I've heard a couple of kids who've begun hunting deer -- hopefully to provide food, and not in the spirit of triumphalist conquest over nature -- described as "killing machines." I've seen men strip the fillets off live fish and throw the carcasses back in the water to swim away.

The animals die daily so we can live; how did we lose the ability to respect them? We've stolen a phrase for our religion, placing to the credit of of one of our mythological characters the idea that "He died so we can live." The poor plantation and scrubland that exists outside the parks is even despised by the people who go in after the deer. One man sneered, "I hate trees."

How do we hate the lungs of the planet? How do we hate that which helps us survive every day, just because it gets in our way? When did the earth and what's on it become The Enemy? Yes, I know the arguments about older religions that were plugged into our beliefs, and the dangerous belief that all is either evil or good. How long are we going to fall for that?

Recently an animal was treated as a toy or a piece of wood, and I had to get involved. I have my own life; isn't it enough that I have to rescue other people's cats when they wander off on the next stage of their lives, because it's not convenient any more? I was told that the person who had obtained the animal, a young puppy, and left him tied with a wire out in the freezing cold, with inadequate shelter and frozen water, had to deal with a family emergency.

"People come first," was the reason.

Isn't that exactly what's gotten us into the mess we're in on this planet? The local people do not know what they've got -- what scraps and evidences of the original wealth that was here -- and they're just throwing it away with both hands. They despise cities, and yet they seem to be going right down the same road they claim they want to avoid. They have a golden place, here -- or at least the broken remnants of one -- with capability to restore it to the wonder it was, at least in part, or at least to prepare in their lifetime for the future, and all they care about is whether they can kill an elk with a heavy rack or if the Seahawks win. They don't seem to worry that any timber industry is dumping toxins into the water, even as the cancer rates up here sky-rocket.

In strictly economic terms, they have the opportunity to build excellent nature tourism, including the fact that the area has been named an Audubon area. Instead, they want to look back to 1910, and the days when they could kill all the fish they wanted, Now they squabble over what remains, even blaming seals and eagles for what they've done themselves; nobody up here seems to have a mirror. As Vancouver Island begins to tap the big-leaf maples for syrup -- a permanent forest-products industry -- the local logging companies are going after those same trees like piranhas. It almost seems like a pattern; anything that provide the local population with an alternate, and permanent, livelihood, is taken out of the way as quickly as possible. This isn't a professional study; it just seems to happen every time.

One of the logging companies decided the Scenic Byway on Highway 112 was an opportunity to show Dem City Folks how a working forest looks. Yeah, that's a really effective conversion tool, isn't it? My father's prejudice as a long-haul trucker may be coming into effect in me, here. But I really should have gotten a photograph of the giant tree a couple of the local maroons stole out of an old-growth area so they could be on Axmen, as though the television producers weren't going to figure out they were dealing with theft. But none of this attitude toward the local life is new; they have an historical culture-hero up here, who supposedly went out and set up a life as an independent man of the forest -- but what he was really doing was living on predator bounties, until he'd cleared out as many of the local cougars as he could get his paws on.

A local farmer continued that attitude, but he had help. Three young cougars came poking onto his land and were trapped in boxes. Cougars wander more than they should, here, as clear-cuts drive them out of their habitat and into local neighborhoods, always with the death of the cougar as the result, as the locals panic (hell, they panic over and face off with rutting territorial mountain goats, but that's another story). A "forest ranger," as he said, told him the cougars couldn't survive if they were shipped elsewhere, so the three animals were shot in their trap-box and buried. There are options for other possibilities; why didn't that forest ranger make the effort? Has he fallen victim to the local feeling of conquest, with its adjunct, helplessness and fear in the face of nature? Who knows?

I shouldn't talk about the people up here as though they were born in the Pacific Northwest, as I was. A lot of them are from the midwest and other points east. Whenever they can't stand the rain, they head for the desert.

Maybe they can leave the desert where it is, and go visit it when they need it, and not try to bring it here?

2011-01-07T17:48:00.000-08:00

The Polar Bear Plunge, Jan 1, 2011, Lake Pleasant, Olympic Peninsula, Washington State.

Heather Wasankari, whom her mother is calling "Chicken Heather!" had every excuse for only running in to her hips. She has about as much meat on her as a chopstick. She's part Apache; not exactly a people evolved for plunging out of a bitter wind into near-freezing water on a mid-winter day.

I made the mistake of telling Heather we'd do this about three months ago. Never promise a kid something you don't mean to carry out, because they'll remember and hold you to it. Anyway, we got ourselves all whipped up for this over several Facebook exchanges, and then we went and did it!

I didn't hang around for a photo lineup once I had the robe off; I just led the charge into that awful liquid burn. Heather's friend Alyssa grabbed her and dragged her in. It took me a week to recover from the cold; I couldn't get my core temperature up at all.

Wish I'd taken the girls back on my errands to Forks; when there, I kept running into kids and adults who'd done this insane thing, and we were all like a bunch of little veterans, high-fiving and exulting over this act of insanity.

2011-01-06T13:14:00.000-08:00

ANIMAL ABUSE OUT IN THE BOONIES

I wonder if it's like the murder described by Doyle; more of it happens because they know they're not being watched.

Nothing like Facebook to end THAT. Yes, I'm using a Facebook thread like a forum.

It's like the slave-catchers happily running north after that evil Fugitive Slave law, and running into posters with their faces on them and pointing crowds, then running back to the South with their tails between their legs.

Us nice people are sick and tired of abuse and stupidity -- AND having to clean up the messes. The weird thing is, bad people HATE to have their badness pointed out. Perhaps there is a core of good there, that knows better? As a Nice Person, I can only hope.

2011-01-03T17:29:00.000-08:00

THE TREES ARE SMARTER

Lord, sometimes living in the United States of Yokeldom.....

Somebody at either the Clallam Bay or Port Angeles post office picked out three bills from our mail and didn't deliver them.

That's right -- lifted three bills from three different businesses. Oh, ha ha, let's play with somebody's business mail, shall we?

Right now I'm hitting the USPS main site to "resolve" the problem. On one hand, the Clallam Bay post office was screwing up our mail back in October, 2005. This time, since August 2010, we were getting all kinds of mail from other people. So if any of you are missing bills, you want to be asking the post office where they went. I know I've seen bills lying on the ground up here; did somebody else get it and just throw it away?

I can tell one of you that I know all about your medical bill at the Forks Hospital. Opening mail -- as we all do, assuming efficiency -- I found a bill. Examining it, wondering what this was about and why it was over-due, I checked the name. OOPS. NOT OUR MAIL. Again. I quickly taped the envelope back up in its envelope and wrote "SORRY!" on it. So one of you up here in Clallam Bay, I know how much you haven't paid and for how long. Ask the Post Office about that. I hope you got your mail. And your bill.

Now, it may be the Port Angeles office that was screwing up, instead. So one of the two was flipping people's bills around to the wrong parties. Since we had three bills go missing, I wonder if this was really an accident? Was somebody at the post office -- well -- going postal?

No wonder so many people hate trees up here. The trees are smarter.

(Note: in some places in the old Soviet Union, the mail isn't being delivered, or, if it's making it to post offices, it's just piling up. The penny post was instituted in Great Britain in 1608; has the post office had its run? Has email and the internet knocked the postal service off its pins? Will all packages go through FedEx and UPS -- and any documents through the private document companies whose vans I've recently seen in town? Nothing lasts forever -- perhaps the post office is being pushed to the edge of the cliff?)

2010-12-30T10:53:00.000-08:00

Chicken Report

Moved the chicken tractor this morning, to a more sunny location, because their water was skinned over with ice last night.

Red, who has been twice caught under the slats in a move, decided to get up in the nesting box and ride.

They've started laying again -- two eggs yesterday.

2010-12-13T15:21:00.000-08:00

WHERE ONLY MAN IS VILE

Ah, the joy of living in rural areas. The latest human nastiness is a woman who, in spelling her name for a newspaper cut line, told me, "It's German. I have to tell people that, because they want to spell it like some Hispanic crap."

BUT -- on the other hand, nature is lovely. After a hard week, we grabbed the first lovely day to take a long walk on the beach and see where the river mouth had opened up a new island, and almost closed the old river, so we could get to the island.

We followed a gray whale down the beach as it fed among the buffelheads, in the deep water off the steep beach, only about 20 feet from us. We listened to a blue heron cuss us out, and viewed harlequin ducks and loons.

The humans can't last forever; most diseases don't.

2010-11-26T10:54:00.000-08:00

Soybean City (Who needs a goat?)

Betsy the woodstove (named after my Dad's green dodge coupe in the '50's) hard at work on tofu, soymilk and sea salt.

No, we don't let all that crap stay on her. She gets blacked every couple of months, and wiped down when she's cold.

I've never been able to make really good tofu before I began making my own sea-salt. See how nicely it's curdling? It's supposed to look like Clouds In A Golden Sky, and it does.

All the soy cooking isn't that difficult. I make the tofu and the soy out of one batch of beans. The tofu is made with the first, rich wash of ground soybeans; the soymilk is made with the second.

I'm an insomniac, but a cup of soymilk whenever I can't sleep sends me right off.

The ground lees go partially into baking, part to the hens, who gobble the white lumps, rich in calcium and protein, like candy.

The yellow whey goes into the dishwater, where it cuts grease, and some is retained for shampoo.

A bag of soybeans is about $25.00 and makes gallons of tofu and soymilk. Without being butted or having to put netting around all the trees.

2010-11-22T10:41:00.000-08:00

BATTEN DOWN THE CHICKENS

Second day of the November storm; snow is six inches and rising. We evidently have Alaska's winter, and they have ours. Oh the fascination of being on the Great Pacific Circling Current.

(right) Tarps on chicken tractor, to keep them out of direct wind. So far, they're surviving the freezing temperatures.

Placed a Dutch oven full of water in the nesting area. Pour boiling water into it twice a day. First time I did it, heard a chicken squawk. But they're not stupid, or followers like sheep -- once is enough.

Made them suet cakes to go with their feed. Gonna fatten 'em up for spring through autumn laying.

During the 2008 blizzard, Jim the cat was forced to live outside by his original owners. This is him (right) going outside for a bit of a run, but keeping an ear cocked for when we call him. No more sleeping on a damp carpet under a porch for HIM.

2010-11-19T17:03:00.000-08:00

Elk Heart

Our neighbor called and said her husband and his hunting partner had taken two elk, and did I want a heart? DID I? Rinsed off the beautiful red blood, sharpened up the ulu knife, slit out the tubes, put the heart on braise in the Dutch oven and took the discard to the beach (don't want to give eagles the idea they eat in this yard, picked up some water for sea salt while I was there). Pretty piece of meat, Ja?

The seagulls thought so!

Oh, and turned the heart into a lovely terrine. Cats like it too! Yes, we share.

2010-11-19T11:21:00.000-08:00

MAU-MAUING THE NEW GUY

The edited and mostly unscrambled version of an email conversation.

D = me. L = the other guy.

L: I just bought 5 acres of timberland from Uncle Ray at the lake end of Hoko Ozette road, and I'll be been looking for people who blog about being mossbacks and living in Sekiu and Clallam Bay. (Or West Clallam Bay and Clallam Bay if you are a purist I suppose.)

D: (This next comment makes me think about how the foreign service has managed to get us into a situation of having our boobs groped at airport security. But I was nice and didn't say anything, because we all live at our own little table at the comicon and don't much look across to the other tables.)

L: I work for you overseas in the Foreign Service and will retire there in 20 years or so. Trying, as I am deep in the clutches of middle age, to start planning ahead I wanted to buy someplace to live long before I actually needed it. So the reason specific reason I'm writing is that I want to hire someone to keep an eye on my land from time to time, act as my agent as it were. I'm thinking I could paypal someone 50 dollars a month to walk the land every once and a while, keep me up to date on doins in the neighborhood. Do you know some high school student who might be interested in being an ad hoc forest ranger? I'd like someone who was going to be around for 20 years, I'm a big fan of continuity.

D: Put it in the Forks Forum want ads: editor@forksforum.com or -- even better -- post a short, clear note on the bulletin board at the Sunset West Co-Op in Clallam Bay (that little yellow building next to Gary's boat corral).

D: I'm reading the Lake Ozette Sockeye recovery plan which sounds like it might impact the land I bought since I'm not far from Umbrella creek.

D: If it does, go along with it. You want to help sockeye recover, right? If it's just woods, why do you need somebody to bother it? It can pretty much take care of itself. Hell, for $50.00 a month, I could drive by it once or twice a month and make sure the "No hunting" signs are up. Other than that, there's not much to do. Land left hands off for 20 years is the best thing to do to it. You could have some nice trees started and the creeks beginning to clean out nicely.

Windstorms and fires are natural. Leave it alone and let it breathe, and let yourself relax. If it all burns down I would reseed. If you just want pictures to dream on, that's another thing. Well, forest takes care of itself. If it's major, keep an eye on http://www.forksforum.com That should do it.

L: And of course I want to support the neighborhood and be seen as a contributor and a member of the community and not some carpetbagger who shops only at costco and never uses the local businesses.

D: Us white people are all carpet-baggers on this continent, anyway, so relax. They stopped arguing about if their ancestors got here in 1889 or 1949 when I said, "Don't do that in front of the Indians, will ya? It makes us look like idiots." Go to Makah Days and have fun: http://www.makah.com

L: I have been to the Makah rez several times and have always liked the people I met there. I am quite pleased that they didn't want to go the casino route and do their best to live the way they want to as opposed to how they should. Never made it to Makah days, at least not yet.

D: You would love the REAL Indian Gambling; slahal. Well, if you're crazy like we are. Dan's 1/16th Wyandotte, so maybe it's genetic.

L: Even though we won't be there very much, we are going to get a family membership to the co-op.

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D: You don't need a membership. Everybody just happily buys there. I just keep an account, throwing $50.00 in every once in a while.

D: Before you start whacking down houses, check out http://www.garbagewarrior.com Having your place declared a wildlife sanctuary can take advantage of the fact that up here is on the Audubon Birdwalk maps. Old-growth trees attract rare birds. Put in a light yurt or tent area and charge birdwatchers to visit.

L: I don't think a small yurt or a tent will work, at least not in 20 years, I'l be old and broken down by then, I'll need something to keep my walker out of the mud, and it was all clear cut twenty years ago, so sadly there is no old growth. If I find there is there is no way I'll be touching it.

D: Nice ones. http://www.yurts.com/?gclid=CJX7gvmiraUCFRhCgwod2BlOZw

D: You could start your own stream by shaping a collection area and delicately running it down toward the other stream. Who knows? Have some sockeye come visit YOUR stream, too! Note: if your trees and ferns are big and wet, salmon eggs can literally stay damp in a "dried-up" streambed until the autumn rains set in. Clallam County is BIG on projects like this -- they give grant money!

L: There is supposed to be a wash or a gulley that may be a stream in the winter time, that is one of the big questions I have when I come out. Good idea about the grant money, although I don't really care about that part. Once I know where everything is, the idea of growing a stream, even a winter only stream, is fabulous, thanks for the tip!

D: I know an older guy here just dug a hole in the ground, and dips up the clear, tannic water for his uses. He's a kind of happy-in-a-lean-to kinda guy, though.

L: I'm not sure what we will do for water and power, my hope is that in 20 years solar will have improved that we will not need the grid, and we will either drill a well or go with a catchment system. But as I said, I'm hoping home building improves in the next 20 years.

D: WATER? You can dig your own rainwater collection pond. Solar and wind will pump you power -- and the PUD is very helpful with that, as well as with local grants and things. Build your own, simple and pure and be sure to put in your own greenhouse (and chicken run -- why tempt the bobcats?).

D: And of course I'd love to start making friends with people in the area now. I'm only up to July 2004 in your Clallam blog, but I loved the idea of Clallam/Sekiu being a designated artists community. And of course now I have an overwhelming urge to get the complete works of Barr for my library.

D: Cool! Up here nobody much respects me as an artist or writer -- they're into rural galleries and local histories, from the 1950's, not publishing or comics. I'm known as The Newspaper Lady (The kids yell, "Hi, Newspaper Lady!"), the freelance reporter from the PDN and the Forks Forum.

L: Wait, I'm confused, did you go there to get away from the fans or to weed out the less enthusiastic ones and make them interns? Given your track record I think a lot of people could benefit from interning with you.

D: Don't ask me. I'm not in control of the little freak show that is my life. And I don't need me any more interns -- I need somebody to hire me to TEACH. EVERYBODY wants what I have for FREE.

L: I read your PDN pieces, the gunfight was quite exciting, shotguns and body armor, oh my! But why are so many PDN story paragraphs one short sentence? I have not read any of the Forks pieces, I can't seem to find a search field!

D: Don't ask me. It's what they do. My pieces are that awful Associated Press style Hemingway was forced to write in, and that has tainted today's literature so badly. My newsy stories I like are at: http://contributor.yahoo.com/user/112562/donna_barr.html OOH, I see it's part of Yahoo now.

L: Hope the windstorm did not treat you too harshly, look forward to hearing from you!

D: Windstorm? What windstorm? After the typhoon and 95 mph winds a few years ago, this was just rain gusts. I'm not kidding; since then, if it's not 85 mph, nobody up here notices.

D: If I didn't know tai-chi, I'd have been tossed in the river while trying to get storm shots for the paper.

L: I will look into chicken tractors in about 19 years when I'm kitting the place out, although the men in my family have a genetic fear of chickens, so I may leave that to the wife.

D: You know, our neighbor's afraid of birds! I wonder if that's because their ancestors ate so many of our ancestors.

D: Well, enjoy the new place -- put in bee hives! Plenty of beekeepers up here, working with the local feral Russian bees, including my try at them (neighborhood was too small).

D: Oh, and solar works up here. http://www.garbagewarrior.com The dvd is in the library.

L: Feral Russian bees? What the heck? The bee hives are a good idea, but would I have to care for them in the intervening 20 years or should I wait? Interesting idea, and the wife wants a lot of plants and flowers and goddess knows the world needs more beehives. Do you know any beekeepers in the area you can refer me to?

D: Look up Tim van Ripper in the phone book. He has all the connections. If I were you, I'd put out some clean second-hand hives and ignore them. You'll need one of these when you get here too (co-op wants EGGS): http://www.chickentractor.com

D: But PLEASE remember you have to make your life around the local bears and cougars. Don't be the people who harass the rutting or territorial animals, get a bit hurt and then have to kill the animal. It's their home and they're COOL (A bit of solar electric fence works nice on bears). Cougars: don't build weak fences and watch out if an idiot logging company clear-cuts next to you -- it drives out the resident cougar and all hell breaks loose. But toilet paper must be cheap, you know (feh).

L:Well, as long as the rutting and territorial animals respect my territory as well, we will be cool.

D: When you move in up here, you're moving into THEIR homes and territories. You need to keep your domestic animals protected. It's not a city neighborhood. When the golden eagles come in we all put away small dogs and cats. If a cougar comes through, same, but also kids and all food. They go away when they find there's no food (tho' one guy had one sleeping on his back porch after getting a catfood feed). The deer EAT here; it's THEIR livelihood. You have to put up a little greenhouse with a top -- easier to garden, anyway. The wet winter/dry summer make gardening very hard. Check out: http://www.squarefootgardening.com/

(L made a comment about goats in rut, here, after having read a PDN story about a goat who took out a hiker.)

D: The dork who got killed by the mountains goats sent the two women down the trail -- and then, with his predator-set eyes (HELLO? Threaten the females and kids??). CAME BACK TO CHALLENGE THE GOAT. WTF? Talk about the Darwin award. Only stupid I-Am-God-It-Was-All-Made-For-Me people run into trouble with the wildlife up here. Our neighbors were terrified when they found they'd bought a place with major predators on the ridge behind them until I 'splained how we live with them. They're fine, now! They think it's cool.

L: I'm hoping no one ever cuts the land around me, but sadly that is out of my control. If I ever see it come up for sale and I have the money I'm snapping it up. Except maybe the gravel pit just west of me.

D: The gravel pit can recover, too.

2010-11-10T11:37:00.000-08:00

November Harvest, 2010

Jerusalem Artichokes (left) and assorted potato varieties (right), including the long Ozette heritage potato (GET your mind back where it belongs!).

2010-11-08T09:07:00.000-08:00

POKE THE BIRD

Here there's a big rock around that headland that BELONGS to a ruby-crowned kinglet. There's a tree near the river that belongs to another one. You take your life in your hands (laughing yourself to death) if you get near either.

Of course, touching the rock and leering, "Oh, is this YOUR rock? And here? And HERE?" can't help. I thought the furious little bead of feathers was going to explode from pure indignation.

Teasing wildlife. We're going to hell.

2010-11-02T16:12:00.000-07:00

SURFING FOR CRAZY PEOPLE

On the Clallam Bay Beach (left). There are ROCKS out there!

Can you see the REALLY CRAZY guys out past the Slip Point Reef? (right)

Very high tides brought out the Rare Breed Surfers: they keep this up and they'll be even RARER.

But don't they make you want to learn to surf? It looks like killer fun!

2010-11-01T10:15:00.000-07:00

The Hick in Techo-Hick

The morning's work, clockwise from upper left:

Frying crackers

Turnip greens (picked from the garden)

Jerusalem artichokes (ditto)

Homemade cheese ravioli

Homemade soymilk (in process).

Upper right: what's left of the peanut-butter cookies, most of which went to the Hallowe'en party last night.

Know how peanut-butter cookies are always too dry and easy to burn? Especially if using white sugar? Accidentally discovered how to make them tender and chewy: soak the sugar overnight in just enough water to make a paste. Try it -- it's a whole 'nother cookie. I don't know if you need to soak brown sugar, but if white sugar is all you have, this works. Hm. Maybe add a little molasses to the white sugar while soaking?

The turnip greens and artichokes will go with rice, probably for tomorrow, but they need to be cooked today, because they're THERE.

Got too busy, let the mushrooms we'd picked spoil in the 'fridge. From now on, the rule of hunter/gatherer is: eat in season, eat when found (or prepare for the next day). Keeps away food allergies, and it's how we're supposed to eat anyway.

Hm. I feel like fish. Maybe if the rain breaks today, after I get the last AFTERDEAD page colored (and maybe the second-to-the-last because it was VERY experimental, and frankly looks like crap, or did last time I saw it), I might go down and get me a greenling to fry tomorrow with bacon oil and Sechzuan pepper. Yum.

2010-10-31T12:53:00.000-07:00

THE MORNING'S WORK

Before I get going on the day's artwork, I need to take advantage of the wood stove's morning flare to do the cooking.

A gallon of sea water makes this much sea-salt (Fleur de Clallam). It's collected from Clallam Bay, out by the far point in that picture. It's slightly damp, very white, and has a very faint sweetness. Only enough is made for us, Christmas gifts for a few friends and occasionally to sell. Up here they call it "Donna's Salt."

To keep from getting my clothes wet, I wear a knee-length sweatshirt dress and flip-flops. Yes, it's cold, but it's never cold enough to freeze. Two gallons are collected at a time, one for each hand.

Peanut butter cookies, made with the Day of the Dead skulls that didn't make it. And the bowl of salt.

2010-10-31T10:13:00.000-07:00

FISHING AGAIN

Four years ago, we lost our old cat Spuds. All fish and seafood coming into this house went to him. When we lost him after a long fight, to nose cancer, fishing just reminded me painfully of him.

Back on the beach, again, this time asking him to share if he wants any. I only fish if I'm hungry for fish. Admittedly, like all fishers, the carnivore/omnivore instincts kick in, and I enjoy the fish's struggles on the line. But if I don't don't think I will want fried fish and bone crackers the next day, I don't fish.

I have a deal on with the fish: when I catch one, I smash up all of my mussel bait, and throw it to out to my breakfast's brethren. No, I don't think the fish know about this deal; it just makes me feel better.

Turns out I'm good at hunting and gathering. If I took up hunting deer, it would be for spikes or, if they ever allow it, does. Because hunting for antlers is just hunting grandpa -- and it's traditionally a practice for war, replacing the urge to kill other humans. And bucks and bulls are in rut: YUCK.

If I were hunting for antlers, I'd turn it into a REAL sport: tracking the same buck every year until he dropped his horns, starting when he was a spike, until he dropped his final set as an old man, and letting the tough old guy feed something that will enjoy him, like a mountain lion. Or somebody who needs a really good, thick hide. But collecting a life-time's horns without killing, counting a kind of coup, would really demonstrate tracking ability and courage. However:

Now for the real reason for hunting or gathering anything: putting it in our faces.

It's not necessary to fillet greenling. Just head and cut, scraping out the bloodline with a mussel shell. Split open. Rinse well, salt inside, wrap in a towel and put in the 'fridge 'till breakfast time. Rinse well, pat dry, fry skin-side down, preferably in lard of bacon grease, although any oil will do. The best spice to sprinkle, lightly, on a greenling is Chinese Prickly Ash, also called Sichuan pepper, available at McPhee's Asian Grocery in Port Angeles, and soon to be available at Sunset West Co-op in Clallam Bay.

Dish, slip out the backbone and slip off the skin and fins. Place them all back in the pan, to slow-crisp. They will make the most delectable crunchy bone-crackers.

2010-10-30T17:38:00.000-07:00

In the middle of the day's cooking, thought I'd give these a try. Can't find 'em ANYPLACE out here:

Can't find Calaveras de azúcar.para el Día de los Muertos (November 1)? (Sugar Skulls for the Day Of The Dead) Make 'em! Here's a simple at-home recipe:

Beat egg whites into soft peaks, mix with granulated sugar until the consistency of soft sand (add a bit of water if too dry). Form into little skulls by hand; use kitchen utensils to form eyes, nose and teeth. Let dry 24 hours. Decorate with food coloring or frosting. They're a great holiday activity with the kids. Sugar skulls are ornamental, and not meant for consumption.

These are my first try; only these four survived a dozen attempted. Do NOT try to cook these; they just fry and stick to the plate! Be patient and dry them.

Forming them: make a ball of sugar in your hand, and then turn it over. You'll be amazed how little tweaking it takes to make a little bony head.

2010-10-21T19:46:00.000-07:00

TOO MANY GOOD THINGS

Been over on Facebook, not posting here as I should. First of all, today's haul: a nice mess of Woodland Russalas, found in a park in Port Angeles while walking between busses. They're simmering here in chicken-stock sauce, with homemade egg noodles, made with eggs from our hens, and green beans. Took advantage of Terry Gross's latest interview, that was running while the mushrooms were sautéing on the woodstove. When the dish was ready, I popped some fresh black pepper, a dash of lemon juice, and home-collected sea salt over each helping. The acid combined with the sweet, hazelnut-like flavor of the mushrooms made the whole melange to die for. Thanks, Terry!

Billions of gorgeous mushrooms this year; biggest chanterelles we've ever found. Honeys, white oysters and puff balls.

Hadn't gone fishing in four years, since we lost Spuds. At his end, I'd been fishing and gathering seafood only for him, and was missing him too much to go collecting again. Back to picking up nice little greenling off the beach. They were only yanking the bait off my hook, until I muttered, "First one grabs it, I stop fishing for today, smash up the rest of the bait and throw it in. So somebody come help me feed your brethren." BAM -- fish on. Smashed up the bait, threw it in, took the one fish home. Nice greenling, which provided too lovely fillets and a sweet backbone for bone crackers.

No fishing yesterday; our neighbor brought over a couple pounds of fresh halibut. Fried up in lard with black pepper and sea salt made of seawater collected from Clallam Bay, boiled in an old pot on the wood stove. A gallon makes about 3 ounces of Fleur de sel. Because of its mineral and iodine content, it's entirely cut back on our salt cravings. It's excellent when used for Live Salt (my term for the fresh grains thrown on a dish at the last moment to spark the flavor).

Built a THIRD chicken coop and it really is a chicken tractor, now. Easy to move, a lot easier to clean, and more accessible for eggs, while retaining security.

The people we got the hens from stuck us with a skinny gray rooster -- who has grown up into a nice, quiet, masculine silver, who only crows a little at dawn, and all the girls love him. The neighbors say he doesn't bother them. Nice deep body on him, too -- if he sires chicks, they may be nice for egg-laying. Dunno; will have to see. His name is Blue. The hens are named Red, Black, Splash, and Inky.

We are SO ready for the rains -- and getting back to some real drawing and writing.

2010-08-25T16:31:00.000-07:00

I've had to sell my bees. Hans Barr (not a near relative of my husband) just bought them.

If you get an error message, just click it a few times, and it will open in YouTube.

2010-08-05T10:24:00.000-07:00

Dead Whale

Hiked to 2nd Beach on the Olympic Peninsula yesterday. Resting against a log in the sand, I couldn't stand the pain in my back teeth any more. Thought it might be that place that needed flossing, was delicately working at it when a ghastly smell floated by.

At first I thought it was something old stuck in my teeth; you with deep places in your teeth know how it is when you dig out an ancient shred of meat and it's gone bad. I dug a little more and the smell oozed by again. Realized it wasn't me; got up and began to look around.

About ten feet away, a five-foot long black woody-looking mass displayed the remains of baby-whale-size vertebrae. Might have been what was left of a head. The crows were happily bouncing about on this bounty. I stood back, breathing through my mouth, and tried to be respectful; it's a whale, after all.

Two guys showed up who were camping down the beach. One of them had a shovel, and they had a very determined look. When they found the dessicated mass, their attitude was exactly that I'd seen in a guy on the beach viewing a piece of dead whale before: "How DARE it rot on MY beach!"

What's up with that? This is nature; stuff dies and washes up. Stuff rots. These two testicles just glowed with a sense of righteous outrage. Maybe they wanted a mint on their pillows.

As I walked away, I saw them covering it up, and some pretty disturbed crows. All I could do is laugh. And laugh.

Smoggy today; literally. The British Columbia forest fires are combining their smoke with our August fog to provide us with our own version of a London Peculiar.

2010-07-29T09:53:00.000-07:00

Being Stupid With Bees

Note: just because we can trot out in our jammies at night to feed our gentle tame bees does NOT mean we can re-arrange a tower of Russian ferals in BARE FEET.

Quite sick, now. Oh, look! I'm allergic to bees! Anybody wanna buy some hives? With nice strong bees? Rats.

A colleague says we comic book people are only good at doing comic books. Nobody else is -- it's extremely difficult and demanding. We're just not so good at anything else.

We'll see how long the chicken business lasts before I get some stupid infection or something.

2010-07-11T10:46:00.000-07:00

Dead Animals So Far

So far, the dead animals of people I know who have taken on farming in forest or other wildlife areas:

1. (Not quite a) Possum. WOULD have been dead for trying to eat food on a goat/horse farm except a visiting friend and me took it down the road and found a place that looked like it had a lot of forage. Are possums native to the Olympic Peninsula? No. But we saved it on principle, anyway. The farm that tried it also stopped poisoning their flies around their barn to give the swallows a chance to build a population and control the flies (= bird food), so they get points for offset. And they listened. So far so good.

2. Raccoon. Mini-farmers from Colorado believe their chickens aren't secure enough, even though the fence would keep a horse out. Nice people, but will never buy any rabbit meat from them. Or promote it.

3. Beavers. Horse people trying to plant trees in a swamp bottom to help kill non-native grasses. Logging company above cut all the trees, flooded the creek. Beavers, taking opportunity to build a pond, which would have flooded out the grass, got trapped and killed. Yeah, that's going to solve the problem. Humans not so much ever going to get me to visit their place again.

4. Horse and cattle farmer trapped three young cougars in boxes. Wildlife officer and he agreed that the animals, if hauled away and released, would die soon anyway. So they made sure of it; the guy shot the cougars in the boxes (isn't he brave?). He did NOT use the hides or meat because it "would have been too much trouble." Then he bragged about it to me, like I was supposed to be impressed (WTF?). These people sell chickens, eggs, hamburger and feed. Guess I'm going to have to get all those elsewhere -- and promote nothing they produce. Oh, well.

5. Fish: Local woman letting her kid shoot mini plastic pellets into the water, where they can be eaten by local bottom-feeding fish, starve them, then rot out to kill ever more fish.

6. Cougars and everything else: Hilltop forest cut next to a neighborhood. Young resident cougar, now starving, tries to get chickens out of a cage, snatches an attacking dog, and is shot. Housing developer then files an environmental action statement claiming there will be no wildlife impact. What timing.

7. Buffalo. In the way, and industrially useful. A whole nation incurs traditional animal genocide karma.

8. Watership Down. This novel, describing lovely English countryside, soon makes the reader aware the only remaining wildlife is songbirds and small predators. Everything else has been wiped out.

8. Me and my chickens: anything gets into their cages it's MY FAULT. I at least have brain enough to know that if I decide I'm inconvenienced by wildlife, that's my fault for moving here, and that if we all decide we're slightly bothered by our neighboring life, we will wipe it out.

Conclusion: I guess I'm just a better person. Oh, well.

2010-07-03T09:49:00.001-07:00

Yeah, we've been busy -- mostly completely repainting everything and taking care of ANYTHING that frustrated us or needed fixed.

Chicken news: Black was being so totally broody she stopped laying. Could not convince her to stop.

In the cartoon book, Memories of a Former Kid, by Bob Artley, he describes how to de-broody a hen: Put her in a small cage by herself and feed her naught but cracked corn and water.

So I cracked some of Dan's bulk popcorn in a blender and put Black into the little isolation cage for chicks or sick chickens. After 3 days, I put her back into her own pen with Red -- she not only had stopped being broody, within a day she was laying again.

See? Cartoons solve everything!

2010-06-05T09:41:00.000-07:00

Black Gone Broody Mad, Bitch

Our black hen, Black (yes, it's a food-animal designation) is brooding her brains out. I even had to go get her some fertile eggs to brood, so she'd get off the nest once in a while.

Now I'm having to lift her up to check she's not brooding Red's eggs, too.

Bad news; they managed to discover eggs are edible. I'll go have to look up something on that.

2010-06-04T21:08:00.000-07:00

Watch Your Kids

Some idiot, while fishing in Clallam Bay, shot a pigeon guillemot; you should be able to see the bullet hole.

If they're flipping bullets around for non-sports birds, they're flipping bullets around with depraved indifference.

There's a term we used to use for kids when I ran a blockwatch in Bremerton: bullet magnet. They just attract 'em.

So if your kid catches a slug fishing on Clallam Bay this weekend, you know where to look. Let me know: I get paid for all the articles and photos I can collect.

2010-06-04T19:47:00.000-07:00

Sunfish in the Strait

An unusual visitor from far-off seas washed up on a beach on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, north of Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, Friday, June 4.

A sunfish, or common mola, estimated as weighing around 1000 pounds, attracted attention from residents at Vista Road and local wildlife and fisheries officers. The fish lay in the incoming surf near the Hoko River estuary, to the west of Kydaka point, on the public-access beach.

The fish is usually found in the south Pacific. Bill Riedel, of Vista Road, said the fish was probably seven feet long, five feet wide and 18 inches through the body. He said that these fish weren't usually seen in the Strait except during unusual weather patterns and warmer water conditions.

Natural Resources Enforcement officer Bill "Tuna" Williams, of Neah Bay Fisheries, and Corey Peterson, of State Fish and Wildlife, dropped by to examine and photograph the fish, partly from personal interest as well as to report the sighting to the Makah Tribal Biologist.

Mahone said h'ed never seen a sunfish in the area before. There was no evidence what might have killed the fish, which showed little damage except for a few streaks of blood on the fins.

Sunfish, related to pufferfish and porcupinefish, are commonly found in the tropical and temperate oceans. They have few natural threats, but are sometimes preyed upon by sea lions, sharks and orcas.

Their diet consists mainly of jellyfish. This makes them vulnerable to choking on plastic bags, which resemble jellyfish when floating in the water.

2010-06-02T09:28:00.000-07:00

Let's Teach The Kids!

It's not uncommon to see someone who's caught a large fish up here laughing and sniggering while beating it to death. While I fish, too, and clubbing is one of the quickest ways to kill a fish, I don't treat these animals who die so I can live as though they're enemy humans I want to exterminate. And I don't fish unless I'm hungry for fish.

Right now it's Catch-and-Release fishing season up here -- that's right, tormenting animals for the fun of it and teaching the kids to do it, too.

Now is the time the big cabazons (relatives of bullheads) and other fish somebody didn't want wash up, dead of stress or worse, because somebody out there was playing with them and threw them away as so much garbage (even little bullheads are delicious, by the way). The fisherman slash Styrofoam bait flats apart and throw them in the water -- and we all know what plastics are doing.

Dan and I keep a beach up here clean and we know when these loser fishermen are in town. I've even seen them leave salmon in a boat to rot while they go have a beer or dinner, because catching the fish is all it's about, not eating them. How many of us know those who hunt for bones on an animal's head and not to eat it? And hunters and fishers wonder why they're losing support -- because they won't police their own.

Along with the Gulf Spill, I don't know how any human dares look another animal in the face right now. I say this as a human who tries always to use less, share and damage less at all times. It's my idiot species, and I can't say I'm not one of them.

If this planet was a test, NO humans are going to heaven....

2010-05-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

Bar None

We have a prison here -- the Clallam Correctional Facility.

"Correctional" gives me the historical willies. How many times have we heard a word like that used in the past?

It's interesting interacting with prison people -- or "interesting," in the way that word is sometimes expressed. The released prisoners, in their brand-new red jackets and blue slacks, ride the buses to Port Angeles or Tacoma, their possessions, in cardboard boxes, sharing the seat with them. One of them was wearing a superb line-art tattoo of a snarling panther. He described it as a prison tattoo, and then how it was completed. The cover is removed from a tape-deck, and a sharpened wire attached to the wheel mechanism, turning it into a tiny mechanical tattoo needle. A lighter is held to the base of a black plastic chess piece, and the resulting black soot mixed with a medium I can't recall, but which probably wouldn't be hard to figure out, given what possibly or nearly sanitary liquids are available in a prison.

At one point, the prison administration listed their zip code as 98326, without using their 4-digit individual code. Mapquest defined the entire zip code as "prison." The listing ricocheted throughout the internet. For a while, trying to order anything possibly dangerous -- even a weed hoe -- on the internet, was refused by Amazon because the zip code belonged to a prison. The problem is slowly being scoured out of the systems.

I almost wrote "corrected:" $!#!! AP style poisoning my vocabulary, like Hemingway. A recent Pulitzer winner told me that "newspapers are circling the drain." I coulda told him that; try to get one to pay you. They get torqued off if you don't fight your way past the cops on a nasty dangerous corner to get a photo, or insult the tribe by flashing away with a camera at the funeral of an important elder (like I need that -- I have to live with these people!). For $20.00 a photo, if I'm lucky. Clallam County Commisioner Mike Doherty made fun of me at a community meeting to a member of the sheriff's department for how little I'm paid and how hard I work for it. I've been less available for a lot of his projects and the local meetings, lately. I have books to process for real publishers who really pay me, thank you. I get more reliable money from the ads on my blogs and sales sites.

Speaking of newspapers, credit where credit is due -- one of them DID pay me for not doing my job, because I waited in vain outside the prison in a freezing-cold truck for two hours around midnight, waiting for my editor to get me permission to enter the place. The important story was about a guy who who filled up one wing of the prison with smoke after deciding it would be a good idea to roast sausages in a toilet.

2010-05-16T10:39:00.000-07:00

The Next Chicken Step

Now we've got the egg production up and running -- 227 eggs as of today -- it's time for the next step.

Rebuilt the bigger cage to make it easier to access for cleaning, and got three nice new chicks (featherball stage) from the Triple Nickel Farm on Highway 112.

The process now is: buy new chicks when the older hens are cycling down (not yet, but will come soon enough), get a big rooster for the older hens and let 'em go on the hill behind us to have a few days/weeks/months of freedom. Better than being slaughtered for soup or braise.

The hill is the breeding home of eagles and other predators. They don't hunt near their nesting area, and they keep down other predators.

I was perfectly willing to try slaughtering chickens, but when I was talking about the whole recycling process, Dan's face crinkled up in distress. He was raised on a chicken farm, and had to kill a lot of them. He just doesn't want to do the same with two hens he considers family pets. So the girls will get an end-of-life vacation.

The new chicks are mixes; a black Arucana mix, and a couple of red/gray mottled things. They cost two bucks apiece. They're still scared, but they know where their compfy grass-lined nest is, as well as the food and water.

After a lifetime of not really eating eggs because Dan can't eat store eggs, we don't really eat a lot of eggs ourselves. Most of them are now part of the swap system with our neighbors, for cleaned, packaged salmon fillets and elk-burger and trout and ling-cod and halibut. Both sides of the swap think they've made out like fat rats and gotten the better end of the deal.

I'm going to check with the co-op and see if we can't just trade for milk, cheese, butter and yogurt. If you've got chickens, you've got a cow.

2010-05-15T08:55:00.000-07:00

Why I quit working for the Census

They need to speak to their mid-level supervisors about making giggly remarks when “they” instruct a trainee to fill out pay-forms to reflect what hasn’t actually happened, just to make it line up with the state work laws. If the people in the offices back east make mistakes about mileage and time in rural areas, they need to work that out, not encourage employees to cheat on the pay-forms.

Signing up to work for the Census was me overloading myself again, when I have prior commitments (like my intern in July!), and having to back out before both jobs go to pieces. And I have these books to finish processing — and I can’t take forever on that, either. It’s got to get done sooner rather than later.

Dan doesn’t know I’ve scheduled three more chickens for the back coop. Sorry, but when one can trade eggs for salmon and elk-burger, and the co-op is asking for eggs, ya just gotta go for it. He did tell me yesterday he'd never had such big, rich eggs in his life, that they were better than the ones his grandfather raised -- with the reasonable caveat that hens and feed were probably better today. He did admit Red and Black are pretty spoiled chickens. Pets, that's all.

Pet pigs, pet lambs... it's how they're treated and raised up here. We're eating ground beef from Triple Nickel Farm on Highway 112, out of a bull the owner said, "He was my pet -- but his calves killed six of my heifers." They were too big. But he was a food animal, and they had to eat him.

Anyway, the Census wasn't paying enough to make me cheat on my pay-forms, possibly get no pay for hours worked, or send me up dirt roads to find people with shot-guns. Admittedly, they pay for all injury and hospital time -- but when one of their safety instructions is "Wear comfortable shoes, in case you have to run" (it's in their handbook!) it does tend to set off alarms.

And this on-line book thing is working, as money trickles in from all sides. Not a huge amount of money, but certainly enough to take care of things. Not spending money is the same as earning it -- and when, like yesterday, you run into a paint shop that is clearing for inventory and gives you enough paint to finish the inside of the house -- "Free! Just get it out of here!" -- that's the same as making a lot of money.

I made more money in ten minutes getting free paint than I'd ever make on another job. "Poverty is a full-time job" can be rephrased as "Independence is a full-time job." Depends on what you do with it.

Note: new Census rule. A "lot" (supervisor quote) of people up to no good have been impersonating census workers. If the Census worker is NOT wearing a bright-orange vest with green fluorescent stripes that say "Census bureau" down the front and on a green fluorescent patch on the back, CALL THE POLICE! If you invite them in and they do -- it's not a census worker. The new rule is: NO going into anybody's home. If they ask to come in -- CALL THE POLICE!

On the way home, I helped several people with census questions. One guy in a business which -- admittedly -- a lot of folks with warrants patronize, was looking at his form and said, "I don't know if I want to fill all this out." When I told him the punishment for a census worker who revealed anything about personal information was 5 years in jail and/or a $250,000 fine, and that a CW could be waterboarded before they'd give up that info to anybody, including the sheriff or the IRS, and that NO information could be released for 72 years to ANYBODY, he went ahead and filled it out. He can help out his more nervous customers, too, now.

For every census form filled out, a community brings in on the average $1400 of gov'ment money. It's about cutting up the pie we all pay into-- they can't come fix your roads if they don't think anybody's living up there. Our library has been closed for a week at a time up here. It's a lifeline for a lot of locals -- knowledge that we have so many people here will help with funding.

The numbers the census collects goes into a pool. They don't look like "The Hernandez family with six kids lives here." It looks like: "This area is 15% Hispanic." And that, by the way, is how you get listed -- the way you insisted on writing it. Evidently people have put down race as "non-white" and "German." I put down "Vaguely Ethnic" and "American Mutt." If Obama can call himself a Mutt, so can I.

Dan, who is 1/8 Wyandotte and living here where "American Indian" can bring in nice funding, listed himself as such. It's not about the little box you belong in permanently -- it's about where people are in their lives for this decade's funding and numbers of representatives in the House of Representatives.

I asked, "What if a gay couple puts down 'husband or wife?' Is it based on laws or society?" and was told, "Put it down. It's what they say they are. Don't argue."

Thomas Jefferson said we have to do this if we live here, so might as well do it. But -- if you got a problem, call the Census office. They're actually pretty helpful. They just want to get this job done.

2010-05-11T07:36:00.000-07:00

All Those Nasty Trees Gone

Pillar Point on Highway 112 used to be shaded by big, nasty, old trees. As you can see, the local lumber company has opened up the other side of the road, so you don't have to look at all those horrible big-leaf maples, Douglas Fir and hemlock any more.

This is on the Scenic By-Way. Merrill and Ring logging knows that "scenic" means teaching the iggernant citifolks what a Workin' Forres' looks like. Tourism ain't got no money for the local economy, of course. The sooner all these in-the-way trees and fish are gone, the sooner the owners can sell to a developer and turn the place into someplace the citifolks can live.

2010-05-06T04:31:00.000-07:00

Workin' For Da Man

Got a job with the census. I'm expecting it to be pretty huge -- a lot of people don't have direct mail delivery out here. And with the meth-heads, scammers and other run-aways, it just may get entertaining. But what the hell, every once in a while I have to get a job that will remind me why working in comics is so much BETTER. And some extra cash for some of the house upkeep we're doing would be nice.

2010-05-04T18:16:00.000-07:00

My bees are really cold. They're barely moving. But THIS gives me hope.

I'll keep providing food and water and staying out of the hive. I don't even know if the queen is alive. Whether she is or not, I'm getting a new monarch from these guys this summer.

Start worrying about your little insects and I'll guarantee you, you'll stop being afraid of them. All you can think of is how to keep the Girls alive.

2010-04-26T15:20:00.000-07:00

Too Close and Not Close Enough

Out in the garden, bent over plucking some greens, I heard a winnowing sound that I'd barely identified as wings -- in that split second wondering if it were angry bees and then a crow -- before I had to duck out from under two hurtling bald eagles. They zipped over the fence and flew off along Bear Kill Ridge on a courtship flight.

(Nobody knows who was killed -- the bear or whoever was hunting it)

About six eagles are hanging out in the area; three adults, three immatures (nothing yet from this year). We call one of the youngsters "Bird-Killer" because she zeroes in on and takes ducks out of the water. We think it's a female; she's big. A month ago she rose from the reef and flew toward where we stood on the beach, rising over sea-ducks feeding near the shore.

She hovered, then suddenly dropped and powered along the waves, targeting a buffel-head drake. The drake took off and flew for his life, Bird-Killer like a big dark jet behind him, her great wings scything through the air, closing the gap by the moment. There was a sudden explosion of spray as the drake dived underwater in full flight. Bird-Killer overshot, then swung around. She wafted up, watching for where he would resurface. He came up, but no sooner than she'd dropped through the air, he dropped back under the surface. of the water.

You could almost see her shrug, before she headed off down toward the mouth of the Clallam Bay River. She's evidently learned what she can take or not, and doesn't waste action. She's going to be a serious competitor once she gets her white head feathers.

2010-04-25T11:07:00.000-07:00

April Is The Cruelest Month

Rats. Our white chicken died. No weird foaming, green droppings, nothing. Just laid down and died. The poultry site says, "Sometimes chickens just drop dead."

Her eggs had been getting smaller -- I thought she was just ramping down for summer. She SEEMED completely energetic. Her eyes are clear and bright. Who knows? The site recommended some Baytril, which we keep on hand. But they also said cut grass is bad for chickens -- and I'd been giving them grass (I thought chickens ate grass!). Maybe they meant oily lawnmower grass, not hand-pulled or hand-cut grass?

We've been keeping cats for 30 years and nearly lost one to a whole WTF? episode with asthma.

And my bees aren't looking so good today. I SHOULD have kept them warm in the house and put them in today. I hate saying "live and learn" when other things die.

We were also calling the hen "Steve" (McQueen, in The Great Escape) because she'd got out once by burrowing under the fence. NEVER NAME A GOLDFISH OR A CHICKEN.

2010-04-24T18:40:00.000-07:00

Amateur Bee Rodeo

Drove two pounds of Carnolian package bees home from Sunny Farms in Sequim today. But of course, it was cold and wet -- it always is when I have to travel or carry something fragile, like art or insects -- with occasional spring-time flashes of sun. By the time I got home, the bees in the box were chilled, but I couldn't bring them in the house because there were stragglers clinging to the outside of the wire box.

At the next short sun-break, I whipped open the hives and poured 'em into the hive. That I forgot and left two of the wax frames out and had to open the whole thing again was just first-timer jitters. Oh, I didn't tell you I was working these bees without veil or gloves? That's how I was taught, over 30 years ago, at Ohio State University. I won't work veil-free once the bees are established, but I needed to be able to see and manipulate everything without confusion during this ticklish operation.

The bees were so cold they were balling up and wouldn't pour out of the box. It took several tries, and by then some of them were beginning to warm up and defend their new home. They got me in the left wrist and elbow -- but it hardly hurt. I guess all that working with nettles for soup and greens the last couple of years has made me more immune to stings.

They're finally hived up humming for the evening; I hope the queen is all right. I lost about 30-40 bees, but out of 10,000 that ain't bad. When I re-queen with the more aggressive and hardy Olympic Grey this summer, I will burqa up for those babes. And if I ever have to package again, and it's cold, I'll have to make the hard decision to brush off the stragglers in a spare wooden box and take the rest of the girls into the house to stay warm until the weather clears. They're like the cells of a brain, not individuals. But if you've ever let a small cold bee crawl up on your finger and carried her to safety, it's hard to think of her that way.

I must get this from mom. When camping, she paid no attention to yellow-jackets, except to give them their own little pile of food and lids of soda away from the cooking area, or to dip them out of the stew. She called them "Mountain Kittens."

2010-04-20T08:51:00.000-07:00

ALMOST LOST KIKI -- file under stupid accidents

Our cats had been coughing lately, especially Kiki. She's the cute calico we rescued up here a few years ago. After a treatment of hairball medicine, the only one still coughing was Kiki. We thought it might be worms; one of our other cats once had worms and the cough sounded like that.

In palpating her belly, our vet commented that she was tensing her lower body muscles. He thought it might be connected to her breathing. I began to remember that she seemed to cough more when she was excited, or purring. Could it be asthma?

We thought about what do do next. He said we should try some cortisone for possible asthma, and it wouldn't hurt to worm a cat in a multiple-cat household. We could x-ray. I said we should start slow and go from there. Our vet is funny. He said, "Well, I can run the bill up as high as you want today." We both laughed.

The cortisone shot caused no trouble. She began to gag on the worm pill and then to slobber and finally to retch. We petted her, waiting for her to keep the pill or cat it up. Then the coughing started. "That's it, that's the cough," I said. Suddenly, she keeled over. The vet's face went flat; nobody had expected that.

He picked her up and rushed her into the operation room. I got out of the way. I felt my heart turn over when I saw her carry her across a hall wrapped in a towel, but he was only taking her for x-rays. He put her back on oxygen, and then leaving her with a technician, called me in to see her x-rays. They showed an airway no larger than a straw, and a small pool of vomit in the lungs. She'd inhaled vomit, then the muscles around her lungs had cramped hard, locking her lungs closed.

Each time she was taken off oxygen, the vet said, "She keeps trying to die." As she lay there, her chest and belly muscles roiling, I put my face down close to hers and spoke to her. Her wide black pupils shrunk, and her eyes focused on me. Each time the tech touched her, the pupils flared again. Apologizing to the tech, I asked her if she couldn't take her hands away, in case a stranger was stressing her. She did so, and Kiki focused on me again. A cat down the hall began to complain, and her attention flicked toward the sound; there was a cat she was going to have to beat up. Perhaps the distraction began to allow her muscles to relax. After about a half hour, the vet tried to take her off oxygen. She continued to struggle to breath, but the vet said it was much better.

When he thought she was "critical but stable," we placed her in a kennel, dark and quiet, and I called Dan. Ever tear somebody's heart out over the phone? To give her a chance to calm, I went and got the rest of my errands done, with my cell phone on (we live far away from town, and the chickens needed food and the house needed things). When I came back, she was much better. The vet gave her a shot of antibiotics, to give her lungs a chance against the vomit, and sent her home.

She's much better today, but we're watching her. She'll probably need cortisone once a month, but from now on everything she gets will be topical; we can't risk another vomiting episode. I told the vet's receptionist they were lucky I'd had a lot of cats and knew this was caused by accident and DNA, or I'd be going ballistic. "Broken heart, small soul," as my character Lt. Winzig once told me.

Damn dropping oxygen levels on the planet. Well, you know what they say: "Cure asthma -- shoot a logger."

2010-04-16T09:08:00.000-07:00

WATCH YOUR MOUTH!

After the liquor store was robbed and I sent in the article, the store owner said she was mad at me because the article said the store had a safe and a computer. Wtf? Did she think we all thought she'd been carrying the store funds around in her pocket or recording inventory on a piece of bark?

She should be mad at the employees who led me around the store, pointing things out and describing what was there and what was missing or not. They made jokes about my reporting in town and watched me writing down quotes and waited while I got 'em right -- which I thank them for, because it was very helpful.

Now about the security -- even though i didn't have to -- Freedom of the Press -- I stopped writing when the cop requested it, as "an ongoing investigation." I e-mailed the editor when the local informer asked to to have its name left out, and he did so. So where was the store owner watching her employees' mouths? Why did she not make her store security policy clear to them? I've told these people repeatedly "You're talking to a reporter" and tried to 'splain FotP.

Journalists -- which I'm pretending to be -- have no souls. We'll send in anything that we can put quote marks around, mostly because editors hassle for it. So watch your mouth around a reporter, especially a freelancer only doing it because nobody else will bother, because it's all meat. WHAT have I said about writers??

Anyway, I just said, "Yeah, you're right, it was an editorial call," and then bought the bottle of wine Dan wanted. That's another thing a reporter will do -- just nod and agree. You never know if they'll say something you can use in details for a later article....

2010-04-09T12:27:00.000-07:00

EATING PETS

Well, it might as well be eating pets, these hogs were so pampered.

Photo in our mini-fridge (left to right): Pulled pork, home-made soymilk, bacon, home-made hummus, rough-cut sausage.

Latest co-op goodie; fresh home-raised pork. The woman who owned the pigs was going to keep the shoulder for herself, but sold it to me instead, out of the stack of paper-wrapped meat at Sunsets West Co-op. $4.00 a pound is NOT pricey for home-grown, boneless, clean pork. Chopped and cut and spiced it into three dishes (about six meals each):

pulled pork: end third slow simmered with red wine, apple juice and sausage mix (see below)

bacon: center third thin-sliced with an ulu knife while partly frozen, packed in glass jar with kosher salt, brown sugar. Chunky hard meat cures quickly to tender, flattened bacon.

sausage: rough-chopped with the ulu knife, mixed with kosher salt, fresh chopped oregano-rosemary-alpine mint, dried garlic-black pepper-nettles, packed in glass jar.

Meals so far: yesterday, one home-laid egg each, one half slice of bacon. Today, sausage red-eye gravy over home-made whole wheat biscuits.

I got the idea for storing food to be used soon in glass jars in the fridge from the letters column of Mother Earth Magazine. Well, where the hell else?

No, we're not filling up a freezer with food. We raise a few eggs, will soon add honey and fresh veg, to trade with those who DO have freezers full. Just swapped a dozen eggs for a huge fillet of silver salmon; three days worth of meals and a big chunk just for the cats. Yes we share -- no sharing, no sense of abundance. Both sides of the swap thought we made out better over the other guy. I don't mind cleaning the hen cage once a month, the guy doesn't mind hanging out in the cold water and gutting fish, but both parties got food that was fully cleaned and neat and ready for the pan. We're having so much fun swapping stuff, we don't care.

2010-03-30T09:54:00.000-07:00

"Not us! Not us!"

That's what the other militias are saying after these guys got caught.

We have a bunch who run around up here with the same kind of ideas, if not methods. They're very proud of themselves because they have an email list. One of them pointed me out and said, "She knows! She knows about Adolf!" Hitler or Menjou, dear?

Hopefully this will quiet them down, now, too. And their swastika-painting friend.

2010-03-24T18:57:00.000-07:00

     God, I hate some religious people.
     I won't go into the whole discussion about slavery, tribal history, yada yada, but at one point, one of the people involved said:
     "That's why that tribe is all gone -- God got them."
      After I picked my jaw back up: "What?"
     "For taking slaves. He sent a tsunami. The tide went out and all the women and men went down to gather clams and -- ."
     "You do know that's what tsunamis do? The tide goes out?"
     "Yes, and it left only the old people and the children --."
     "I would be pretty careful about saying god got somebody for being bad, considering where we live. You don't want to ask why he got you if a tsunami came in. And as Americans, I don't think we should be pointing fingers about slavery."
     Let's just leave it at that. I'm beginning to think we're living in the 1880's. Wasn't that time for one of the Afghan wars, too? And the American South running amock trying to turn the clock back? With the help of the nuttier of the religious orders? It's hard to keep track sometimes.

2010-03-05T17:14:00.000-08:00

Mussel Chowder
Just felt like wandering down to the reef and picking up a few small mussels for chowder. The big ones are too coarse; they're best for bait for greenling or lingcod. Oddly enough, Dan doesn't like the mussels. I find them rather yummy. This chowder also had onions, potatoes, golden beets, garlic, butter and soymilk (a bit sweeter than milk for cooking). You can see the little mussels in the broth.

2010-02-06T11:56:00.000-08:00

Sorry, Loggers

The girls on the Crescent Lake Loggers basketball team didn't get named in the photo I sent to the Forks Forum, and it's not even really their coach's fault.

I'm a bonobo. We're different than the chimps of the human race. We don't like noise and team sports. We don't scream in groups. We don't follow. We love sex and we get a lot of it but we don't like to watch; we're the ones during the extended sex-scenes in Sundance films who finally yell, "More plot!"

I managed to stick around at the game long enough to get a photo of the girls, including a shot of one of the Clallam Bay Lady Bruins reaching for the flying ball while pelting through a gang of Loggers. It was easy to identify the Bruin -- she was on the home team -- but I couldn't get the Loggers' coach's attention.

I'm not going to say he was rude; he's a coach for a sports team, after all, and they're like soldiers: too much maturity and brains and the job isn't getting done. I'm not blaming him for acting like a snotty 16-year-old, because otherwise his girls don't win (well, they weren't winning anyway, but it was the Bruin home court). It's how the older men men try to talk to women up here; it's like it's 1955 in their own minds.

But -- people -- here's the rules when working with a journalist, even a small-paper nothing job-trained stringer like me:

1. If you want to be in a paper for something good, you have to push your own agenda. You have to stand still and get your names spelled right. Those kids are your little bags of DNA and if you don't have time for me as the deadline clicks closer, they'll end up being "unidentified" rather than mis-identified. They're not my kids, I don't care about 'em further than the bucks I'll get for the photo and/or article. My editors know this is only my day job. They'll pay more attention to the passionate local than the payment-driven free-lancer.

2. If you want to be in a paper for something bad, just bleed or do something stupid or very illegal. You don't have to try.

3. Nobody "promised" they'd get what you gave them in the paper. A car wreck can knock the inches that you think might have belonged to your community meeting right off the page. The only way to put a meeting on the front page is to shoot somebody at it.

4. If you buy an ad, don't expect extra coverage in your area unless it's newsworthy. Buying an ad is like buying a male prostitute -- you get the inches you pay for, and no love.
5. Don't ask the reporter, "What paper are you with?" if you're making it a condition for information. Neither the Paris Match nor the New York Times is going to come cover your piddly little game. You're lucky I showed up. You and your town are NOT the vortex of the universe, especially when you are complaining and demanding to be treated like the local high-school cheerleader queen.

6. If you want to find out just how nice newspaper people are, get a copy of His Girl Friday. It's still not that far off.

That said, thanks so much to the very cooperative people who helped me get the right names for the K-3 kids hand-signing the "Star-Spangled Banner." And to the folks who called me about the game and the signing in the first place. They promoted what was important to them, and I showed up and took the photos and got them to the paper that evening.

Thanks god and their good manners and thoughtfulness that they sent the stats in for the games; if I had to stay around all that shrieking and running much longer I would have crawled under the bleachers and strangled myself on my camera-strap.
Front-page coverage!

2010-02-03T09:17:00.000-08:00

Now I know how the rooster feels.
   E.B. White may have waxed romantical about hens, but when our hen White is standing outside yelling just to hear her head funnel sound, it's hard to think about anything but braised chicken (yeah, that's right, birdbrain, I'm thinking recipes when I look at you).
   She does these fertility dances with her throat out there whenever anybody lays eggs. Black doesn't say much, and Red just drops 'em in the pen. But White talks her brains out the whole time like she's responsible for all the production around here.
     We figure all this noise was originally about letting the roosters in the original jungle-fowl flock know there was an egg, and to get him revv'd up to fight off anything under the trees.
     I'm not using "brain like a chicken" to describe stupidity any more. I don't care what our antique sciences (read: religions) say about animals not thinking, the modern sciences are finding out how wrong that was. Chickens think, and it's mostly about how we're Not Doing It Right.

2010-02-02T11:21:00.000-08:00

Land of Eggs and Honey

We have a problem; too many eggs.

We can't eat more than one a day each, in whatever form -- they're just too rich -- and the girls are out-laying us. We'll have to take the excess to the folks who give us salmon. Poor us.

The eggs are color coded; the two pale yellow-green (bottom left, top right) are from White. The large pale brown (lower right) is Black's. Red lays the dark red with white speckles (upper left). Black's eggs are the richest -- but she's by far the fattest. Lift her up and feel the rolls of blubber and all you'll think of is duck-style-roasted chicken.

After feeding them for a year, was thinking of just buying grown layers next time, but now realizing the rich feeding while they're growing up is what's making them good layers, despite their youth and the season of winter. We've discovered a source of great calcium; dried-out sea-urchin and crab shells from the beach. It's where we get the good grit, too, with the addition of sea minerals. Fat hen + loads of calcium = loads of fat eggs. Well, d'uh.

Speaking of feeding animals right to get a return: after years of thinking and research, finally bought a beehive from Sunny Farms. It has two fully-framed brood bodies and a honey body. All the amateur -- and I do mean "WTF are we doing?" amateur -- beekeepers up here are listening to me when I tell 'em NOT to feed the bees crappy sugar and corn-syrup to get them through the winter. Hello? Colony Collapse Syndrome? The bees are having enough trouble without being given crummy ersatz food. Or, to quote, "Thou shall not muzzle the ox that treads the corn," if you need something from that antique-science book. The local Olympic Grays ("Pioneer" bees from Caucasian stock brought in by white settlers over a century ago and gone feral) are pumping out honey and white wax -- from the Douglas Firs, would you believe! -- like little machines. One keeper has over 100 pounds of honey on one hive. Imagine what fir honey tastes like. If you like pine-nuts.... At least I'm imagining it; nobody's tasted it yet.

My hive is actually painted; I found some neutral base, so the hive can have that nice raw-wood look and still be protected. I'm not going to buy bees; I'm going to ask one of the local keepers if I can put one of my hive bodies next to his until we get a swam to inhabit it. Maybe offer him some eggs.

2010-02-02T10:47:00.000-08:00

Final Goodbye
     Went back and dug down a bit into Hector's grave, and placed a large butter-clam shell containing a slice each of butter and margarine into the little hole, then poured milk into it until it overflowed. Covered it back up, replaced the big square beach-tile back on top after scratching "Hector '92-'10" on the surface.
   My brother's cat Holly died the same day. He and I had better have our ducks in a row when we go, or the Old Basement Cats will GET us. Purr with Bast, guys.
   Dan and I keep looking at the sofa where Hector lay, to check if he's hungry, or comfortable, or needs washing. Exhausted, emotionally and physically. Now I have a bad case of the 'flu that is turning into bronchitis; will have to have some Skookum tobacco (age-controlled site) on the beach today and actually -- YUCK -- lung-suck it, to kill the germs and clean out the phlegm.

2010-02-01T09:04:00.000-08:00

You Can't Keep A Good Cat Down

First, a poem from Kate Murray:

God bless all pussycats
And keep them safe and warm
Especially those who are in heaven.
Give them a safe path to the Rainbow Bridge
And if they have no human friend help them to find one.
And today especially bless Hector
who showed us that even Basement Cats are full of love
(especially for those who give him smoked rabbit).
Give him lots of prey to chase and subjects to rule with a firm yet gentle paw
and salmon to fress, Amen.

Thanks to the gods for a hideous head cold/'flu that showed up yesterday morning. We are much less torn by grief when we're dripping snot out of our skulls. Digging a deep hole through rocky soil is no fun with aching muscles and a fever, but it's a lot better than trying to do it bawling the eyeballs out of the head.

Hector was washed down one last time, then formed into a comfortable position on a towel in the cold back-bedroom shelf. When he'd cooled down (putting any warm cells into a cold hole gives me the willies), his fur looked like it had as a young cat, thick, dark and rich, with only a few grey hairs. He was wrapped in an old quilt I'd made years ago, and then into an old tatami. He was given his bowl and plate and bits of nice food, including smoked rabbit, cheddar and milk. Unfortunately, I think I gave him the soymilk. I will have to go pour real milk on the grave (the cat equivalent of the human bottle of whisky). I also forgot the margarine and butter. I'll have to do something about that. We've dedicated the spirits of all protein we'll eat to him and the other cats. Or he will be back stomping on my pillow with dirty feet: "WTF??? Fake milk? Are you high?"

His grave was planted with white Dutch clover and dark red and pink Columbines.

Yeah, yeah, he can't feel a thing. Funerals are for the survivors; ritual is like medicine. Such as Gratefulness Candles. Try 'em; they work.
Then the whole of Sunday was thrown away watching Dead Like Me DVDs. That's another thing that works.

2010-01-31T09:17:00.000-08:00

Hector's leaving
   These notes aren't really for you. They're for us.
     He had a good dinner last night, then began to fade. Last night he couldn't move any more, but he was breathing quietly.
     This morning, his heart rate is going up and down. When I tried to re-adjust his head, he told me to stop it, that he was doing this himself. He has begun to take the final deep gasps.
   19 years, doing whatever he wanted to do, and the last few being Top Cat with all the purr-ogatives. He'll be buried in the back yard with Lina and Treat, lying together just as in this 1989 photo (Hector's the black guy, Treat the calico kitten, Lina the striped). A fruit tree will be planted in the middle of their circle.
   We should all go so well.
   He just left. I've bathed him and the fancy funeral is later on, as soon as I dig the hole. I'm the daughter and granddaughter of grave-diggers. Explains my shoveling skills....

2010-01-30T10:16:00.000-08:00

The Hector Report

Hector's still here! We think we've found the secret for turning around the don't-eat, don't-drink phenomenon at the end of a cat's life: bathing.

We'd given him meds, hydrated him, worked on his bad stomach. Nothing really seemed to make him feel better. Then I began, morning and evening, to scrub him rather briskly all over with a washcloth. This was originally because it's becoming hard for him to walk and he's had some toilet accidents. He's easily exhausted. After the first head-to-tail scrub, he seemed better. I remembered how I'd scrubbed our cat Lina as a tiny kitten when she'd gotten crusty from her food bowl. So I started regular baths and bed changes for Hector.

It seemed to turn him completely around. He's purring, alert, and eating readily, even hungrily. No, he's not getting better, but he's enjoying himself, or at least sleeping, watching us and his food. As long as Grampa can do that, he's not going anywhere. It's not hard to keep up, either. His brain and his heart are still good, so the rest can be supported a bit.
Oh, and if a cat won't drink water, heat it up. They come from desert areas and what little water they drank was probably from the hot edges of the oasis. When they weren't just getting it from the meat they ate (Don't feed your cats dry catfood if you can afford it -- they'll die of kidney failure for sure. Well, don't they?).

2010-01-27T17:17:00.000-08:00

Hoko River Shake Mill
     Ever seen a sawmill saw sharpened by machine?
     Tim van Ripper runs the cedar shake mill at the Hoko River sawmill. Even when he doesn't run into the rare rock, he has to regularly pull the big saw out of his shake cutter and sharpen the massive teeth (in the film, you can see the swoop of the metal rim that contains the saw as the camera swings back into the sawmill after showing the Hoko River and the old sawdust burner).

     Sharpening is a three-step process. The first two steps, which usually take from five to fifteen minutes each, true the teeth. The final process (shown) normally takes about three complete revolutions of the saw in the sharpener. If the cedar chunk contains a rock grown into its wood, it can chip a sliver out of a tooth and then re-grinding the teeth and final sharpening can take as long as three hours.

     This is van Ripper's newest saw. He has two others; the oldest is marked 1899. These big circular saws have been sharpened by machine since they were invented, by devices orginally powered by steam and then by electricity. They required machine-grinding to keep them true, or lined up absolutely flat to their cutting surface. The sharpeners take surprisingly little power. All that's required is a 1-horsepower motor to turn the saw and lift and apply the grindstone. The grindstones are replaced every couple of years.
   Note to art welders: Tim's got some old saws over ten feet in diameter and piles of massive old gears and parts. Think of those in your next installation.

2010-01-26T12:59:00.000-08:00

Braised Rabbit

     This is the rabbit after marinating in brown sugar and salt, slow-roasting in a woodstove-top oven, then slow-braised with a homemade Chinese-style sauce base and a 1/2 can of cranberry sauce in a dutch oven on the same woodstove.

     A French braise would have included wine and Herbs de Province.
   These intense flavors will allow us to use the rabbit for over a dozen different rice dishes for at least a week. Pen-raised rabbit is costly, but a gourmet treat, and needs to be extended to be enjoyed as long as possible. Especially these prime bunnies, purchased on the farm where they were raised.

     What would we do without Wikipedia? We'd have to be typing in all these descriptions of common, basic methods over and over again. This is like providing a dictionary, right in the article. And don't tell me you've been reading a traditional book and NEVER almost raised your hand to Search or hit a Link.
     Liar.

2010-01-26T11:42:00.000-08:00

Gourmet Cat Food
Finally -- something Hector will eat in chunks: marinated and slow-roasted, slow-simmered Chinese rabbit. He didn't want it marinated, or raw, or roast. He wanted it falling-off-the bone, saucy COMPLEX (No, he didn't get the whole rabbit -- rabbit's expensive. His stomach is pretty touchy, too, so a few nice nibbles did it).

Did the rabbit with my complex home-made version of a Chinese sauce base and -- my whammo ingredient -- canned cranberry sauce, It adds a sharp, slightly bitter sweetness that resembles -- but doesn't replicate -- plum sauce. Mix it with apple-cider vinegar and sesame oil, and forget the ketchup dipping sauce.
Or add some hot chili sauce and garlic. NOM!
I was going to smoke the bunny after marinating it, but decided to try a roast-and-stew treatment. I've done it with goat, and it's luscious. Takes a while, but it's worth it. Makes the rabbit go a long way, because the flavor is so intense. That tasty gaminess still comes through, but richer and more developed.

Dan was refusing to touch the rabbit until it came out all saucy and oriental. He had some on rice. He can't eat a lot of complex things, due to a very touchy digestive system -- his rice was eaten with tomatoes, tofu and a little cheese -- but he had to have a taste of the rabbit.
Me? Bad weird health and all, I have a great blessing -- a stomach like a leaf-grinder. I get to eat anything I want.

2010-01-26T10:44:00.000-08:00

Hector's still here!

He can barely walk, now, but his spirit is still there. Cats hang onto their spirit until the bitter end. He still purrs and staggers off to drink water and rest where he wants during the day. He just went into the back bathrooms to drink his helping of hot water, and then sat down to suck up a load of cold. He is doing better today.

A less beloved animal would have been gone by now. You know how it is.

2010-01-23T10:38:00.000-08:00

Basement Cat
Hector is a LOL again.

Friend who left bag of smoked rabbit should know Hector just about stretched his eyeballs and neck out sniffing after the bag as I carried past.

He did NOT want little bits he could swallow (predators don't chew). He wanted a WHOLE BIG HUNK he could attack and shear with his back teeth. He managed to scissor that big chunk in half and lick it all over. Then he sat back, full of smoked rabbit grease and juices and looked happy. Happy Basement Cat.

2010-01-20T21:59:00.000-08:00

Unwatered Wine

The Greeks said not to drink unwatered wine, for it would lead to madness. I'm snorking down the Gallo Paisano with no care for Homeric safety regulations.

Mostly it's because we're still on death-watch for Hector. I have a million things to do, and can only circle uselessly around them. Or watch Hector to see if he will even eat a smidgen of food. Or to see if he wants me to put on his green leash and let him all rickety pull me around the yard. The other night he did it in the dark, three times through the working wood-pile. No doubt to lose me so he could go die under the house. I'm sorry, but it's the only thing I'm not letting him do. Mr. Weird is now Mr. Flat-ass Stubborn. Anyway, after two and a half months, all the grief of my life -- humans as well as animal, including a terrible loss and a missed opportunity recently -- is circling my head and turning me into a vegetable (this is drunk writing, so I'm not taking responsibility for any of it).

Ran into a very dear friend on the beach today, who said that their household fell apart as their old dog died. So I don't feel so lost and stupid about it now.

She had smoked rabbit. We swapped for our smoked salmon. Then we spent the evening blathering and laughing. She's one of the few people up here on my intellectual level, and her daughter is a living spark. I, of course, did not recognize the kid. How am I supposed to recognize someone I could once pick up and carry and who can now look me in the eye? Some kid is going to figure out that adults -- especially we old farts -- cannot recognize them before and after the growth spurt and scam us to dead.

Next step, if I can just get anything done: build the basis for the bee-hives. I love honey. The 3 hens are laying what comes to an egg a day. The seeds just came in the mail. With honey, eggs and veggies and the occasional fish, we'll have more than enough to eat and swap.

I may have talked myself into milking the old farmer's cows for him. As he said, his 80 + years hands can't do it any more, and he's had to let the cows dry up. If I do, it's half the milk, and I don't care how that makes me sound. CHEESE. And yogurt. Which I'll share with him, too. Fuck, I'm becoming a farmer.

And another shot of the young whale on the beach the other day. Note how close to the shore. It shelves off very abruptly.

2010-01-19T16:51:00.000-08:00

Young Gray Whale feeding on the Clallam Bay Beach.

2010-01-19T13:07:00.000-08:00

Smokin' Dem Salmons
Ah, smoked salmon. The neighbor gave us a big frozen Silver salmon. Because they don't like Silvers. Yes, we live where people get to have preferences for salmon. I, for instance, prefer to smoke pinks. I find them less greasy once smoked. Most people don't prefer them. I don't smoke the big White Salmon: extremely fat Kings. Once smoked, they only taste like smoked pork. Delicious, yes, but why pay salmon prices for the same taste? White Salmon is best just barely grilled. I don't much care for trout or steelhead except for the crispy fried skin; the meat is actually rather thin and sour. Oh, have I gotten spoiled.

Here's the salmon itself. I tried a Gravlax recipe, but found it too sweet and rather insipid. I'm sticking to simple salt brine, the meat then well-rinsed and dried, from now on. Or no salt, Indian Style. Are we getting gourmet up here or what?

Here's the smoker. These folks have asked for a photo of it. It's just some cedar shakes from the Hoko River sawmill and some old grills and broken concrete bricks. That thing in the background is the greenhouse, another scrap building project. Not pretty, but works great! Especially now the arctic winds for the melting cap ice are turning our summers into cold, windy horrors for gardening. Guess I just have to wait for all the cap ice to melt and then enjoy hot weather gardening for a little while before we all choke on the carbon dioxide. Trade-off.

I've made the text larger for this blog. As much for my eyesight -- near all my life, now wandering farther out -- as for yours. Odd that we get far-sighted but the focus remains as clear. Are the elder apes supposed to sit on the home hill and watch for lions?

2010-01-16T17:57:00.000-08:00

Home-made blackberry wine, with oranges from the neighbor's niece's orange tree (she lives in California).

Home-grown oranges taste like drinking very fresh Nee-Hi soda.

The wine has a fresh, fruity flavor -- but it's got the kick of a crowded mule.

Gonna make a LOT more of it next year. Not a commodity... but a gift.

2010-01-16T17:48:00.000-08:00

Finally got the new chicken cage pretty much done. It's made of junk lumber, so it's not necessarily so pretty.

That's Red, White And Black enjoying the new place.

No, I'm not naming anything we may have to eat someday.

2010-01-15T10:51:00.000-08:00

Hector's still here, and has stabilized. He's slipped into a weak, thin, but interested old age. So far, his water bag IV is set at two units (about an inch) of water per day, he gets Diazepam (Valium) twice a day, and while he usually eats a dry kidney-support diet, we let him have anything he wants. What can it hurt, now? Knowing he has purr-ogatives lets him know he's still top cat. Or, officially, Top Cat Emeritus. Leo is Top Cat, now, sort of. Living with Leo is like living with Denny Crane, but without the penis comments.

Chicken emergency resolved. As the hard rains of the El Nino came in, the chicken cage became unbearable. It was originally built for security, but this made it almost impossible to clean. So for about a week, I threw myself into building an actual mobile cage -- a bit too heavy to be an actual chicken tractor -- to get them out of the filthy, muddy, ammonia-reeking trap their home had become. Red, the hen as tall half-way up my thigh, and the boss chicken, was yelling for help.

Yesterday I ignored the lashing rain, each hammer-blow splashing water as though it were coming down in a puddle, and slammed through the project until the cage was at least sturdy and completely enclosed. The neighbor was so upset at seeing me soaking wet in the rain she brought me a nice red rain jacket. I tried to tell her I had spent much of my childhood in the cold rain. My father was injured and in pain much of my early life, and mom just threw us out in the rain to fend for ourselves. We didn't know we were abandoned; we had woods and beach and fields to play with, ponies and peacocks, seagulls and wandering hounds. But we did spend most of our time soaking wet, sometimes just stringing our tennis shoes (we got one pair a year) around our necks on our shoelaces and running barefoot.

But, back to the present. I ran in the house and changed my sloppy sweatshirt so I wouldn't get the nice red jacket wet on the inside and dashed back outside before I warmed up; it's running in and out of heat and cold that makes a weatherproof person sick. By the time I got the cage finished, it was the hen's bedtime, and no time to move them. Red did lay her first egg, however. A PINK one. White's are yellowish, Black's are light green. Easter eggs!

This morning Dan helped me move the hens. Red was squawling to us to come rescue them, and came to my hands to be handed out of the hutch. While Dan ran with her to the new cage, Black came in to be caught, too. My God, is that a fat hen! She's rather gorgeous -- in the sun, shimmering black/green with black edges on each feather. White was an idiot -- white chickens usually are -- and had to be cornered and caught in the muck.

The moment they were all together in their new hutch and cage, they happily started scratching the grass. This is growing over a concrete-tile path that is nearly covered over. Let THEM clean the damn' weeds off the path. Then we'll roll the cage to the next patch on the path and sow the edges with white Dutch clover. Ha! They can replace the nasty thin grass with nice rich clover while they're at it -- and they lay just enough eggs for us to have scrambled eggs twice a week.

2010-01-12T15:17:00.001-08:00

Surfing Deer

There's no photo for this, but today we watched a blacktail deer doe swim steadily across from Kaydaka Point in Sekiu to Slip Point in Clallam Bay.

When she got to the breakers over the reef she-- well - pretty much surfed in on the waves, walked out of the foam, and trotted along the pebble beach before hopping up into the underbrush on Bear Kill Ridge and out of sight.

Didn't have my camera with me, but it doesn't have a telephoto lens, so it wouldn't have shown much anyway.

A lot of the deer swim from island to island and across the Strait of Juan de Fuca and in Puget Sounds. Give 'em a few million years and the earth might see a sea-going mammal descended from our local deer.

Why not? Whales come from the family that spawned hippos and seals from the dog clan. I wonder what a deer-based whale would look like....

2010-01-10T09:21:00.000-08:00

Dan on the Clallam Bay beach yesterday with Echo, the neighbor's malamute, and the other neighbor's lab, Willy. With film.

It is Clallam Bay Unincorporated Law that before you walk on the beach, you must be issued with a large, friendly beach dog. Take your pick between Greyhound/labs, pit bulls who eat fish heads and then try to kiss you, etc.

2010-01-10T08:45:00.000-08:00

Hector's still nibbling food, but he's getting water injections, Kaopectate before every meal, and Valium twice a day. He's very thin. He still likes his back rubbed, and even erects his tail a little.

He is constantly reminded he is still Top Cat, with a special place on the couch (it's actually my work place, but since it's Mommy's place, he considers it a Purr-ogative). He doesn't sleep on the pillow with me any more, and gets snotty about it if I try.

Mr. Weird still gets indignant at medicating. He's always done just as he pleases, and retains his stubbornness, which is amusing. It's HARD to see the black ones -- I have to study shadows to see if Hector is really there or not.

He was carried to the beach yesterday. He couldn't walk back, but he wanted down to sniff wet grass a little. As long as he can show any interest -- and glare at the dog -- he's staying.

2010-01-09T17:23:00.001-08:00

Those of you who have been following Hector's story at the Desert Peach site, the old guy is still here! He's lying on the sofa beside me, munching his kidney diet bits.

Hector's Christmas video.

This is a shot at the beach the day after Christmas, 2009. Still pretty handsome, huh?

After he got down from my lap and walked on the log.

Hector walking back from the beach.

Today he can't walk back from the beach any more, but he appreciates being carried down and allowed to smell the bunches of grass down on the trail.

The neighbor's malamute, Echo, was begging to be taken to the beach today and stuck his head in the door. Hector gave him such a look: "If I could get up, you would get such a zetz!"

2010-01-08T09:25:00.001-08:00

Rebuilding the chicken tractor, or building a new one. The old one turned out to be too heavy to move!

I'd had the new one partially built, for light weight and security, but it didn't pass the waterproof test. So I had to tear it apart and start again.

Part of the problem is building with junk materials; this is actually much harder than starting fresh with a plan. You have to play jigsaw, and the stresses and balances are much more difficult.

I'm glad I'm stubborn.

Two more eggs since the last one -- one pale brown, the other more yellow. So all the girls have had their first period. If these are the pullet eggs, then the adult eggs should be a very nice size.

2010-01-03T10:02:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted on this blog in a long time, but I'm going to start using it again for actual posts about our non-art life. The farm stuff, sort of.

Here's the first egg, laid by White (the other two are Red and Black; I don't name anything we may have to eat). This egg -- with a tinted shell reflecting White's ArAmerican blood -- was micro-poached, served on homemade bread. The shell was quite strong, from all the crab shells I pick up on the beach and crumble. The yolk was orange, not yellow, and sticky-rich.

Am building a new cage, one I can actually MOVE. I figure it will be better to have an actual chicken tractor, to clean the garden at end of season, get the weeds out of the walk, and not get nasty. It’s made of junk lumber and nails, so it’s not at pretty as the ones at the Chicken Tractor site. I have a terrible time visualizing where boards will end up, so of course it will be a bit crooked and ugly. But the hens will be happier. Happy hens = more and better eggs.

2006-04-11T08:47:00.000-07:00

Consolidation

To pick up the thread, go get a helping of Wolf Food.

2006-03-04T12:26:00.000-08:00

Fishing Hurts.

I have the worst pinched nerve in my neck today.

That happens whenever I put any strain on my back. I try not to do it. But last night, a big lingcod surprised me.

Friend and fellow artist Chris Wasankari was with me when I was fishing for greenling.

A lot of greenling fishing involves starting to haul in a foot-long fish, and suddenly have a huge pole-bending fight on your hands, and then the fight goes out of it, or the fish escapes. You wonder that such a small fish has so much fight.

A greenling started its small steady pull on the line, and I started to reel it in. Suddenly the pole dropped and I had a real fight on my hands. Reeling in so hard and fast is what hurt my neck.

I nearly had the fish to the beach when the heavy pressure came off, and the fish I pulled in was again just a foot-long greenling. Good eating, but where comes this huge fight? Are greenling that strong?

The fish was scored with the marks of larger jaws, and the vent was torn open. I had proof of what I'd long been suspecting.

When you hook a greenling and drag it out of a kelp bed, sometimes a lurking lingcod rushes out and grabs it. A ling is a big mean cousin of the little mollusk-eating greenling.

If the ling can haul the greenling off the hook, you lose the fish. If the ling can't get the greenling off the hook, it spits it out and you get a bit-up fish. I once saw one of the Hat boys haul in a three-foot-lingcod, its greedy mouth stuffed with a hooked greenling. The fish was dragged clear into the shallows and the only reason the kid didn't grab it is because, unlike its smooth-mouthed cousin, it has a mouthful of tiger teeth, befitting a predator. That one managed to yank the kid's catch loose and take off.

So if you're ling-cod fishing, grab fast, don't get your hands near its teeth -- and don't reel in too fast or hard.

Ow.

2006-02-05T13:31:00.000-08:00

Ducking the Bullet

Had the guys from Rainmasters putting up a new roof on Thursday.

Friday, 70-mph winds hit the coast.

We ducked that bullet by ONE day. Jeff Layman, who owns the company says that our roof was just beginning to rot and go soggy. The storm would have brought a flood down on our heads.

BUT now we have a lovely new roof that should take us the next thirty years.

"Good!" I said. "We'll be dead by then."

When you're 53 and 58, you see this big projects as something you won't have to do again because you won't outlive them. It comes as a relief. THAT's done. One less worry in life.

Anyway, the Harvest Brown roof matches our little yellow double-wide just perfect. The roof can air out now, because it's vented all along the ridge. The old double-wides were too airtight, and they'd rot from the ridge. The new venting will let the house breathe.

A guy I was talking to about roofing, who had put his own roof on a couple years ago, didn't know this, and he had to do it all over again. And Labor and Industry won't sign off on your roof unless a bonded company does it. Maybe not a problem now, but who needs to jump through more hoops come time to sell? The job wasn't that expensive, anyway, not for the great job they did and with all the materials.

Up here you don't fool around with roofs. Maybe in Arizona, but up here the rain will just eat a house to death if that roof isn't put on right. It's worth the money to get a professional with a long history of putting up roofs between the rain squalls.

Even though the power went out Friday at about 11:00 am and didn't come on again until about 3:00 pm Saturday, we sat by the woodstove and listened to the wind howl and whip at our perfect ease. Because I couldn't get on the computer -- everything was down, trees, electricity, dsl -- I just sat and did pages for the newestDesert Peach all day long.

I don't get depressed in the dark. Some candles in some cut-glass vases -- which act as Fresnell lamps -- and I'm good for the day.

We will have to build some kind of shelter for the Bug. Or hold the tarp on the car better with the punji cords.

2006-01-24T14:03:00.000-08:00

Ling Cod Back

Eagles at Slip Point:

With the fish having taken off for vacation or something since September, we hadn't been getting much fish in the diet.

The greenling do seem to be back on the beach. Caught three nice ones within the last week, which means that I can feed raw fish to our old cat Spuds.

Yes, Spuds is still around. His nose is still blooming, but we're keeping the virulence of the growth back with a silver/sulphur cream. He'll probably end up with a Jimmy Durante nose, but at least we won't have to drag him all over the place for biopses and surgery. The old man is 17. Dan and I have a living will so nobody will put us on machines. I've threatened to have "Do not resuscitate" tatoo'd on one wrist, and "no heroic measures" on the other, just so the emergency personnel would read it for sure while trying to take my pulse. After having inflicted heroic measures on other old cats, we don't want to do it to Spuds. He's having too much fun sleeping in front of the wood stove and running out into the sun.

Anyway, about the ling cod: threw the greenling heads and guts and skins back into my favorite fishin' hole. So I shouldn't have been surprised when something HAULED on my line today and chewed it off, twice. If I'm going to chum for ling cod, even by accident, what do I expect?

Ling cod season opens in May. I'm getting a wire leader.

Dan on the first nice day in a long time. He's watching eagles:

2005-12-24T15:43:00.000-08:00

Brakes

Yes, the busses in Clallam Bay's school district DO have brakes. In an earlier post, I guess I scared people by making it seem like the busses won't stop. I meant that the brakes are very very delicate, being air-brakes. One has to step on them softly but firmly.

I'm getting not half bad at driving these things, or so Bob Cain says. Bob owns Cain's Marina, and does the maintenance on the busses and got stuck with teaching me to drive. I'm not scaring the willies out of him when I back up any more. At least he's not ducking behind the seats.

I didn't grow up driving trucks and boats or backing them up, so backing up is difficult for me. Bob's got this extremely narrow little alley beside his property that he's using to teach me to back into. It's a bear, but it's a good idea. If I ever get the hang of back-turning the bus into that alleyway I'll be able to back between the line of traffic cones during the test. Bob's a pretty good teacher.

2005-12-24T15:35:00.000-08:00

Cyber-Fish

After 3 and a half months without a bite, I finally pulled a decent-sized female greenling in off the Slip Point beach. Fish haven't been biting all over the straits and into the ocean, so this one was a bit of a surprise.

She looked a bit odd. Her golden back was nearly red and the light places on her gill covers and belly were more white than the usual yellow.

When I opened her up, her flesh was bright blue. Not the usual greenish-blue of a greenling, but bright chemical blue. Her stomach was pale artificial blue and very stiff. In fact, everything in her except her heart and liver was like hard plastic. It was like cutting into Cyber-Fish.

Her fillets, after two days soaking in milk, came out nice and white, but the milk was chemical blue. We ate the fillets anyway. They cooked up lovely white and tasted great. No ill effects.

No one I described her to could explain why a fish might be bright light blue, until Dan and I were out cutting wood with Tim van Riper. He said that the divers around here sometimes illegally use copper sulphate crystals to drive octopodi out of their holes in the rocks. This greenling, in her foraging for crustaceans on the reef, had probably swallowed one of the crystals.

At least now we know.

2005-12-24T15:30:00.000-08:00

Already On Television.

I'd been thinking this place would make a good setting for a play or a book or a movie.

It's been done.

Picked up a dvd of the second season of "Northern Exposure" at the library the other day. In the course of watching the show I started recognizing the characters and places and situations around here.

If that ain't that bunch of red-headed kids I don't know what is. And the way everybody is always running around doing something with kayaks and second-and-third-hand trucks, and moose in the streets (or, in our case, eagles and the occasional cougar).

Or maybe these little rural towns are just all like that. When I was watching that show a decade ago, I never realized I'd be moving to it.