Discontent

“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York,
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house   
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”

Thus sayeth Richard III about the accession of his brother to the throne of England.  Well, of course it doesn’t turn out well, but there is some echo of our current situation here, independent of how it turns out.  It is certainly possible that there will be at some time a glorious summer for us here in Point Roberts, but at the moment, we are getting the winter of our discontent, and particularly we are getting all the clouds that lour’d upon our house fully engaged in their lowering.  At noon, it is as dim as at 4 p.m.  And by 4 and change, it is dark.

This month has offered us unrelenting rain and cloud, with some days a tremendous amount of rain, while some other days offer us only quite a lot of rain.  Although there have been days—a few—which have had scraps of sun or at least of lightening skies, they have been so few and the brighter periods so brief that by now they are about as easy to believe in as that glorious summer supposed to be somewhere ahead.  November is always like this, but the cheerful days of summer always make one forget what is coming straight on.

Up here on the Sunshine Coast, where I am at the moment, we have not this past week had the hard winds that knocks out the power.  But down in Point Roberts, I am told, there has been much crashing of trees and much knocking out of power.  This loss of power is a real hardship if it goes on for more than a few hours and if one has no independent source of heat or cooking other than the disappeared electricity.  It is at least a good thing that we have neither creeks nor rivers to overflow, although flooding from the ocean can occur.   We are hoping that no tree has downed itself on our P.R. house and garden, but our near neighbors, who would know, are not in residence right now, either.  So we will have to wait until next week to see what has become of us.

Much discontent. 

Fear Not!

Yesterday, I received an email from an old California friend who moved to Whidbey Island about six months ago. We’ve been trying to find a time to go visit her, but it’s been hard what with one scheduled event or another. She writes that they will be in residence in December unless they have called a moving van by then, responding to their neighbors’ warnings of fearful power blackouts and gray skies and relentless rain. I doubt if she is actually thinking that there will be any call to the moving company or is fearful of gray skies or rain because she is a stalwart trouper, but I think that is how people feel that city people are likely to respond to life in the rural (or sort of rural) northwest. It is true that there are regular power outages, it is true that the skies are really gray in these dark months, it is true that it rains a lot (this morning, for example, when it was hard to believe that anything but staying in one’s pajamas, in one’s bed, in one’s bedroom, with one's engaging novel ought to be happening, never mind those scheduled events on one’s calendar.

Still, you can buy a generator if you are too worried about losing power; and you can put up some cheerful LED light strings and buy sunlight-corrected light bulbs to fend off the gray days, and you can buy a nice raincoat or a sturdy umbrella for the rainy days. It’s not like living in, say, Minnesota in the winter after all. It’s not dangerous. Hardly anyone I know has a generator, when it comes to the fact. A friend who lives on Salt Spring Island just bought one because there, he says, they have periods of a week without electricity, and if it’s going to be a week, you are going to lose whatever is in the freezer. That’s a reason not to live on Salt Spring Island, maybe, but it’s not a reason not to live on the mainland, where the power, at least in my 16 years up here, has never been off more than 48 hours, which a refrigerator/freezer can manage if you are not opening it all the time. In neither Point Roberts nor on the Sunshine Coast are we in danger of flooding from excess rain because everything runs very quickly into the ground, down the ditches, and into the ocean. We don’t have local rivers that overflow. (Flooding can (and does) happen from the ocean, of course, if the tides are high and the wind is strong and from the wrong direction, but even that is pretty much restricted to houses proximate to the beach. And that’s a reason not to live too close to the beach, I guess.)

Overall, however, there’s not much to worry about, or at least not much that is within one’s control (as contrasted with, say, earthquakes). I don’t know what will be the effect on the northwest if the Big Three auto companies fold, but I don’t suppose that any of us has much to say about that outcome. But this is life in the time of fear, which has become the U.S. brand; but it’s also life in the time of a big belief in personal control of one’s life. We’d be better off it were Life in the Time of Stoicism. The Stoics thought that the goal of life was to live in agreement with nature. I’m pretty sure that would include gray skies, lots of rain, and power outages. Californians! City People! Be Not Afraid!

Apples, Tulips, and Reservoirs

What an extraordinary book is The Botany of Desire (by Michael Pollan). I have been sitting on the porch reading it, off and on, these past few days. If you are a fan of books that tell you a great many new things about subjects you thought you already knew about, it is a book you, too, might be very pleased by. I’ve only read half of it so far, but even if the second half is an absolute dud, the first half will have been plenty worth it. It is divided into four parts; the first deals with the human desire for sweetness and looks into the nature of the apple. Part two ponders the human love of beauty, focusing on tulips. Part III elucidates intoxication and marijuana, and Part IV, control and the potato. As an apple grower and tulip grower, myself (though on a very small scale, of course), I thought I knew quite a lot about both. Wrong. I’ve never grown marijuana, but I grew up in Idaho, ‘The Land of Potatoes,’ as every license plate told me, so I think I’m genetically knowledgeable about potatoes, but we will see. The book is part science, part literature, part personal observation, part general wonder, and the best parts of all of them.

It is a summer kind of book, slow, leisurely, wondering, and wandering. And we are having a lovely summer right now, with three weeks or more of no rain, 70+ degree days, the slightest hint of clouds now and then for entertainment. I sit outdoors, reading, and feel the air barely moving about me, as if it were delicately marking the edges between me and itself: this is Judy, this is air.

The sun means that flowers are flourishing, including the mallows (picture above) that appeared in our garden this year, certainly an illustration of the botany of desire if I needed one. There are five of these volunteers (brought, I imagine, by the birds), and ranging from five to eight feet tall. Their seed output will presumably be prodigious and perhaps next year, the entire garden will be mallows (which look to be related to hollyhocks but are not: instead, they are related to hibiscus).

But all this lovely summer/no rain means that we are starting into drought status, the brown lawn areas confirming it. We are supposed to use water sprinklers only on even days or odd days, I can’t remember which, largely because I don’t own a water sprinkler. If things get watered, I must stand there and make it happen, hose in hand. So watering is rather minimal. The mallows seem indifferent.

It seems so ironic that each summer brings water shortages in a land with so much rain. But the rain is all year except now: July and August. And if you don’t have much time without rain, then it doesn’t pay to build big reservoirs. Reservoirs here are small relative to the population using them and it is always a crisis of sorts in the summer. If these rainless days start to extend to a longer period due to global warming, then the crisis will be a real one. But for now…more like a possible problem than a crisis.

However, the Sunshine Coast Regional District (sort of the equivalent of a county government in the U.S.) takes the water supply very seriously. A year or so ago, they realized that with the significant increase of population here on the coast, the water supply was going to be seriously inadequate. Building new reservoirs: very, very expensive. So, in an act of what seemed to be extraordinary thoughtfulness and political courage, the District instituted a program through which the District paid for two, new, very low-volume flush toilets for every house, and paid for the installation as well. It’s an expensive program, but the District reasons that the amount of money saved by NOT having to build a new reservoir will more than pay for it. An Australian company supplies the toilets at low cost in order to have real data about how much water savings their use provides. Because flushing is a household’s major water use, it makes sense to reduce use in ways that don’t depend upon voluntary efforts.

It is nice to have somebody actually thinking about and working to solve a problem. The District reps will probably not go into history like Johnny Appleseed distributing his apple seeds, or ever be featured in a book like The Botany of Desire, the subject being toilets and all, but I salute their courage and foresight, especially during these days of no rain.

Moss and the Family Manse

When I first moved here, I was amazed not only by the moss-covered trees and ground, but also by the moss-covered roofs. They looked so charming and brought to mind Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, a book I have never actually read, but remember clearly from a childhood playing the card-game ‘Authors.’ A moss-covered manse (as he called it) seemed mysterious, filled with strange possibilities.

Once I began working on the abandoned house quilt series, however, moss-covered roofs began to seem all too obvious: once the moss sufficiently covered the roof, the water seeped into the very structure of the house and it began to slump, even if only ever so slightly. Moss was not mysterious: it was rot.

So today, in this lovely month of Junuary, the summer solstice almost upon us, I was more than a little surprised to look up and see that our roof is absolutely paved with moss. We have never had so much moss on the roof. The roof is essentially covered with asphalt shingles, but now every shingle has a tiny green carpet upon it, a emerald green carpet of extraordinary beauty with respect to color and texture, but nevertheless an absolutely devastating sight. How did this happen? Normally, the roof gets cleaned regularly (happily, it has no very big slope) and, as there are zinc strips along the ridge line to slow the moss down, the cleaning can be done pretty much by sweeping the roof with a broom on a dry day. But the endless rains of this spring and summer have provided no time for the roof and its mosses to dry out and be swept. Thus, it felt, as I saw it fully today, like we were facing ruin.

But it is not that bad, really. Roofs are, however, a serious problem up here. In Southern California, one could not help but feel very sorry for roofers. On those endlessly hot and sunny days, to be working on a roof seemed like one of life’s serious punishments. Up here, the other way. For six months of the year, it’s hard to find a day nice enough to work on the roof, although there are some deeply-committed roofers who get up there in any weather. But for the most part, we’re more inclined to tarpaulins, particularly blue ones. It sometimes seems to me that one is not a true resident of Point Roberts until you’ve had a blue tarp somewhere on your roof for at least a year.

We have one, but it is small, over a leaky skylight. The blueness of the tarp gives the room it’s over an even darker cast on those days when there is enough sun to make a difference. Our neighbor’s house, pictured above, is much more seriously tarped. He had a large tree branch fall down and partly through his roof and has had a very big blue tarp since then. He has part of a new roof, which gets worked on a little at a time, as the rainless days allow. It’s not the best thing to look at, out the window of my kitchen, but at least he has no moss.

Little Dark Days

Wednesday was the coldest June 5th in historical records (which means that the lowest temperature for every other June 5th was higher than this June 5's highest temperature) here in the northwest corner. For the third time, we have un-turned off the pilot light. At least one can say that hope springs eternal. Not only has it been unusually cold, but it has also been very cloudy and dark and it has rained almost steadily from Monday evening until Thursday noon.

It has not been an easy three days because we have just gotten to the point where we are thinking that warm weather is our natural right. But the sun came out today in the late afternoon, many large slugs were trying to find darker corners to hatch new plots and new slugs, and the people are once again looking forward to a good day.

In the meantime, if you can find the June 9/16 New Yorker, read Haruki Murakami's wondrous essay on how he became a novelist and how he became a long distance runner (unfortunately, not available on the web). It showed me with absolute clarity why it was that I didn't become a novelist, didn't become a long distance runner. I wish I'd read it when I was 16.

Cloud Reigns

Because I lived my earlier years in a high desert area (southeastern Idaho) and the bulk of my adult years in a low desert area (Los Angeles), I really never expect it to rain. When I first came to the northwest, I was astonished at the greenness of everything. Outside of the tropics, I had never seen such an abundance of green plants. The northwest generally lacked, however, the brightness of tropical flowers, although it surely had a wondrous set of spring colors in the rhododendrons and azaleas, for example, that would never be seen in a tropical zone with its harsher reds and oranges.

I knew that the northwestern greenness was connected with the rain; connected in a very immediate way, but still, it surprises me to hear the sound of rain on the skylights when I awaken at night or in the morning, or even when I’m already awake in the middle of the day. This morning, we awoke to a steady rain, and it has continued throughout the day. It takes a lot of rain to get anything growing on the forest floor adequately watered. Especially if the things on the forest floor were put there by the land owner and not by the forest itself. This spring, I planted the abundant lunaria (money plant, silver dollar plant) seedlings that I had grown from seeds throughout the forest areas, and I have surely felt a little silly to have to water these plants all spring because the rain has frequently been light and charming and silvery and not anywhere near heavy enough to penetrate the tree canopy and thus get to the little plants. But today’s rain is getting there and tomorrow’s rain ought to make it even better.

Nationally, of course, there is plenty of folk lore about the rainy northwest. But the fact is, it doesn’t rain all that much here. It’s hard to get accurate figures on annual rainfall; at least it’s hard to get them on the net where the sources may not be altogether reliable. Checking around, it would appear that the annual rainfall here is about 40 inches, which is less than the annual rainfall in southeastern Missouri. If you figure that it rarely rains in July and August here, that means those 40 inches of rain are spread out over the other ten months, which is to say an inch a week. And that seems about right to me. It rarely rains a lot, but it often, a plurality of the time, rains a little. An inch of rain a week, divided into 3 or 4 or 5 of those days in that week, isn’t much rain. And some of those 40 inches come in bigger swoops, leaving even smaller amounts for those other 3 or 4 days.

What the predominant weather of the northwest really is, is cloudy. It’s cloudy an enormous amount of the time. That makes it an easy climate for people with light blue eyes, who are more likely to be sensitive to the glare of sunny locations, like low deserts. The cloudiness makes photography a lot easier and it gives you amazing saturated colors for general visual pleasure. The cloudiness keeps it from being too hot. So there’s quite a lot to be said for cloudiness. When it’s cloudy, you can work in the garden, or go for a walk, or even fly a helicopter if the clouds aren’t too low.

What rain gives you, by contrast, is a need to have projects that require concentrated attention for hours at a time. Even I can’t read eight hours a day, but today I am reminded how nice a rainy day in spring is for getting all those quilting projects that are in midstream out of their closets and onto the design wall. Eight hours won’t even begin to make an impact on them; but then tomorrow may give me another four hours, at least. Hooray for the occasional rain and the reliable clouds that give life focus and variety.