It Really Seems Like Spring

No real winter yet (except for that cold 10 days in December), and now everything has decided to spring early.  It's astonishing to drive around and see the fruit trees springing forth with blossoms.  There are azaleas and rhodos making early presentations; daffodils abound everywhere that there is sun to encourage them to open.  Many of my raspberry bushes are leafed out; the currants and Indian plum are almost past blooming, and the crocuses have finished in my yard.  People are starting to put in gardens, or at least do the preparatory part, the part that usually starts in April.

And there's still time for a sudden frost.  I'm a little overly concerned about things suddenly going bad at the moment, but it doesn't help to have the Associated Press trumpet Chile's earthquake as a model for Vancouver/Portland/Seattle/Point Roberts (well, OK, they didn't mention Point Roberts, but it's obviously part of that triangle) and their coming giant earthquake.  So far, though, I haven't seen a news story headlined, Vancouver's Olympic Snow Could Still Arrive from the Skies.  I'll check the papers more carefully tomorrow, though.

Temporary Relief

We are about to be on the receiving end of the bears giving up their marauding and their instead just going down for a long and well-deserved rest.  In anticipation, though, they were marauding around this past week at the neighbor’s house, just up the hill.  The neighbors had left a downstairs window slightly open, there were apples stored in the downstairs, and the bear whacked through a window in hopes of finding a convenient route to the indoors.  Unfortunately (for the bear) a small, broken window doesn’t do much for the bear’s ability to enter a downstairs.  And, fortunately for the neighbors, the bear didn’t roam around and look for a larger window to break through.  Of course, the bear’s greater deficiency is his inability to deal with doorknobs, since people probably don’t much lock their doors at night.

It is surprising that they don't enter houses more frequently.  I have had friends report them wandering around on decks, checking out grills, sort of banging on windows; and I heard this year of one house where the bear had actually come in for awhile while there were people in the house (they locked themselves in a bathroom, I was told).  When the bear did his marauding down here in our yard last fall, I was pretty impressed with the teeth marks and the claw marks he left on the compost lid while trying to figure out how to open it.  Eventually, he figured out that just sitting on the whole thing would do the trick, but to see the deeply gouged claw marks on the lid surely gives one a sense of the bear’s enthusiasm for getting the job done.

But now that we are post-U.S. Thanksgiving and December closing in, the nights are getting colder, the trees have lost all their fruit, and the pumpkin, too, is gone from the ground.  And so, time for bears to bed.

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. 

Ice in the Heart

My sister wrote me the other day to wish me an early ‘Happy Birthday,’ and inquired, in passing, ‘What do you guys do up there in the winter?’ Good question. She lives in southern California so she doesn’t have recent first-hand experience of what anyone would do anywhere in the winter, I guess. Seventy degrees there, today; stories of record-setting high temperatures for this time of year.

Up here, in rural Washington/B.C.: afraid not. Well, some records set, but in the opposite direction of course. People often ask me what we do up here in the off-seasons. I guess that is because, if you are a city-dweller, and most of the outside people I know are, it’s not entirely clear how anyone would live a daily life that would appear to have so few extracurricular options, as city people know them. Even discounting Vancouver’s nearby presence, there are some options. When I lived in Yap in the mid-70’s, that was a life without options. An island in the South Pacific without beaches and virtually no food of interest. There was the option of taking a shower in the outdoor shower with the water--warmed by the air--coming down from the water drum on the roof or taking a shower in the outdoor shower when it was raining hard, which it did every day. That’s a limited option.

By contrast, winter life here has lots of options. You can’t garden, really; that’s an option for the other seasons. Also, you might have a job. But if you don't, you can go out for walks; you can go visit friends; you can read; you can quilt; you can while away endless time at the computer; you can bake bread and cookies and make jam and soup; you can watch DVD’s and listen to music; you can build and make things. And you can play a musical instrument if you know how to. And I do all of these things—except for the musical instrument--but mostly I read and quilt.

Right now, I’m reading about torture. A few years ago, I decided I would spend a year or so reading about the Middle East on the grounds that if I was paying taxes to kill people, the least I could do is learn something about them. That was a worthwhile year of reading, although not always cheerful or encouraging. I really resent those tax dollars going to that goal. Now, I’ve moved on to reading about torture, pretty much for the same reasons. If we’re going to be a country that does it, you ought to know exactly what it is that you are helping to pay for. Otherwise, you just end up being like people in countries (which ones we shall not here name) who said, ‘I had no idea what was going on.’

I need to know what it is I’m helping to pay for. I started down this road after watching a DVD called ‘Taxi to the Dark Side.’ Then I moved on to Lawrence Weschler’s book, ‘A Universe, A Miracle,’ which is about the torture regimes in Brazil (1965-75) and in Uruguay (1975-85), and how people tried to find a way to a public accounting. Now I am at Jane Mayer’s ‘The Dark Side’ about our own adventures in this activity over the past seven years. Needless to say, it’s not a pretty picture. And of course that’s not the end of the reading list, either, because that’s not the end of the histories of those who have tried to figure out how to do it or to get over having done it. (South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are surely another source of information.)

However, this reading is definitely winter-time work. The bleakness of the outer world, as well as the starkness and even elemental quality that winter can bring fit the subject. In the summer, it would be hard to believe that what I am reading is true. In winter, when the snow sits for weeks because it barely gets above freezing day after day and the sky stays gray and the sun seems barely to rise on the horizon, not so hard.

On Tuesday, my granddaughter wrote to me that it had been the happiest day of her entire life. It took me a few minutes to realize that she meant because of the Obama inauguration. She is filled with the hope of the young about what will come next. When I look at these years of torture and loss of habeas and permanent prisoners and vast killing of Iraquis and Afghanis whose lives were more like mine than they weren’t, I think of them against the backdrop of eight hard public decades; she doesn’t even have two. Of course, she would--indeed should--be hopeful. As with the torture books, it is important to remember the spring and summer, the times of possibility, and the seasons of good and compassionate work done by and in the name of the U.S. It is not all winter.

But what are we to do about the ice in our hearts that arises from the knowledge of this torture regime? Acts carried out by our agents, with the urging and knowledge of the highest people in the government, acting in our name and on our behalf? What are we to do about that? Too late just to refuse to know. And ending it, as Obama may have done today, doesn't end the knowing about what has been done.

Microclimates

Last month’s drive up to the Sunshine Coast started out poorly with snow and slush and ended up with a completely icy road. And the next two weeks were no improvement. Today, we started out from Point Roberts to the Coast enrobed in the persistent fog we’ve been having for the past four or five days. Not so bad you were at risk while driving, but still, pretty foggy. I was surprised to find that there were little patches of snow here and there as we drove up south of Vancouver. And then more surprised as we got farther up on the east side-drive-around to find considerable amounts of snow all over the place. Somehow, they’d been having quite different weather than we had in Point Roberts, even though it’s barely 20 miles away.

Then, of a sudden, the fog disappeared and the Vancouver sky was as blue and as big as the eye could manage to take in. The sun was shining everywhere. After a month of cloud and more cloud and lower clouds plus fog, my eyes were hard pressed to adapt to this glaring light. It was like being back in L.A. on a summer day. By the time we got out to North Vancouver, the remaining snow was getting more extensive and the fog was coming back and the sun and blue sky were definitely no longer with us. And as we approached the ferry terminal, visibility was getting pretty limited.

We boarded the ferry and had the good luck to be the first one on the ship in the outside upper lane, so we had a good view of the water. Except that the fog now had become so thick that there was no view of anything. I couldn’t really tell whether the ferry was even moving so deprived were we of any reference point. The ferry sounded its foghorn every few minutes and I thought about being out in that water and hearing that sound and, given zero visibility, trying to figure out what you would do in response. Not good at directions under the best of circumstances, I suppose I’d just run into the ferry or manage to let it run into me.

After about 45 minutes, it was apparent that we were near the end of the trip because people we’re getting back in their cars. Nevertheless, there was no sign of any shore or dock. Then, about 150-200 feet ahead, a slight outline of dock emerged. I guess they made the whole approach, the whole trip practically, on instruments.

Once off the ferry, there was still fog, but not so thick. By contrast, there was snow everywhere. Either it’s been very cold up on the Coast over the past two weeks so most of the previous month’s snow is still on the ground, or they’ve had more snow because when we left, the snow was starting to melt and, in Pt. Roberts, it’s been entirely gone for the past two weeks. On the other hand, at our house, when we arrived there, we found absolutely no sign of snow. This is a climate of microclimates, but I’d never seen it illustrated quite so extensively and definitively. Clearly, there are half a dozen kinds of bad—or at least undesirable--weather, and everybody up here has had some of them, but nobody has had the same selection. I wince to think what comes for the next two weeks, and bid my good wishes to the four daffodils I found this morning, pushing firmly up from their bedding.

Rocks in Our Heads

Everyone I speak to is beginning to be a little weighed down by this long space of dreary weather. There’s been only one day that I remember in the past three or four weeks that seemed like a day you’d like to spend more than ten minutes outside. Ed commented this morning that this was the longest spell he’d been unable to fly in the past ten years. People who didn’t plan vacations for this part of the year are asking themselves what they were thinking of with respect to that lapse. People who did plan vacations for this time of the year but then couldn’t go for various reasons (usually medical in my age cohort) are asking why they have been so stricken by bad luck. I imagine those people who planned vacations and then actually left for foreign climes are chortling poolside as they raise their little drinks with parasols to the beauteous setting sun and the balmy breezes drifting through the palms. I doubt if they are thinking of us, although they are doubtless thinking they’re glad not to be where we are.

And then, those of us concerned with the changing of the guard in Washington, D.C., are wondering why this is turning out to be the longest period between an election and an inauguration in the history of western civilization. Hope in the face of weather and now the promised new administration does indeed seem audacious. More audacious than we are up for. We find ourselves asking why, if we are facing the greatest national crisis in 70+ years, we are having ten inaugural balls next week.

Probably we’d all be feeling a lot better if we went out for a brisk walk, even though it is cold and wet and foggy and windy. Exercise comes with this promise of making you feel better. They’re always saying that exercise is the best medicine for feeling depressed; the very fact of doing it, they promise, will cheer you up. But then, we ask, if exercise is so good for you, why is it that I’ve been doing it for over thirty years and I still don’t like it? By contrast, I quit smoking over thirty years ago, and I still (occasionally) miss that. Something wrong there. Maybe I should quit exercising and see if quitting would make me miss it. Maybe I should just go out for a brisk walk. I feel like I've got rocks in my head.

Winter Garden

I was reading yesterday that my tasks in the January garden included inspecting to see whether things were getting ready to come to life. What a pleasant task. Instead, I am walking through my winter garden and noting all the things from fall gardening that haven’t gotten done yet. Half of the raspberries got cut back, but only half. All the old fern leaves need to be trimmed back before the new ones start up and in a northwest forest-y garden, there are plenty of ferns to be trimming. There are yet maple leaves, wet and unattractive, clogging up paths and flower beds. Not enough to provide a nice mulch effect (not to mention a warm blanket for slugs), just enough to suggest that a sluggardly garden-wife lives here. The calendulas kept blooming into late November, and I never quite got to cutting them back, so they stand there, now with unsightly black, blown flowers, brought to that state by the quick and hard freeze we endured last month.

In addition, everywhere I look there are small and medium fir branches, brought down by the winter winds. They ought to be gathered up for the disposal pile. There are little starts of ‘herbe robert,’ a dreaded plant that I am trying to get rid of but if I don’t get a start on that infestation soon will have no chance of getting rid of. So much work, so much time, so much bad weather: too cold, too wet.

Not bad enough to hide all this unsightly garden, though. Those in harsher climes, as I remember from having lived in them, can simply ignore their garden all through the winter because it's under a bed of snow and instead devote themselves to gardening catalogs, imagining the joys that spring will bring. Those in warmer climes, as I also remember from having lived in them, never get to quit gardening, which has its own lack of appeal. So we are stuck here, needing to do some gardening chores but not having enough seemly weather to achieve them.

Unable or unwilling to do what I think ought to be January chores in the garden, I tried the book’s recommendations. I went out, looking for signs of coming to life. Of course, the Indian plum trees have fat green buds, which is reassuring. More than reassuring, though, was the discovery of the tulips, forcing their way up from that cold ground and now about 2 inches up through the messy leaf mixture. They won’t bloom until April; so kind of them to make a show now when we really need the encouragement.

Twelve Days of Christmas

It’s been twelve days now since I’ve left the property, which is two acres (mostly woods, but with the house and one open field), and I haven’t even been much outside because it’s cold and because the snow is pretty deep and I don’t have much in the way of winter boots. In any case, it has been pretty much a white landscape which has an aesthetic appeal with respect to purity and cleanliness, of course, but lacks much in differentiation, at least it lacks much that I am used to looking at and differentiating about. I walked down to see the fishpond, but the fishpond was covered with ice and the ice was covered with snow, and that was that.

The snow remains abundant, even though the temperatures have risen (today, it is 2 degrees C./about 38 F.—I only do rough equivalents from C. to F. or F. to C., but before I came to Canada, I’d couldn’t do anything but 32 F.= 0 C.). The trees boughs have all given their snow up, but the ground is more accommodating. It is of course going to be very wet when this all melts, but unlike Whatcom County, the entire Sunshine Coast is on a fairly steep incline to the ocean, so the water goes away very quickly without flooding us. We live on a part of that steepness: steep road down off the highway and a driveway steeply down from the road. Christmas week is not proving to show much work ethic among the road clearers. They’ve got the highway tidied up, but we are on a road less traveled and, as Robert Frost warned, ‘that has made all the difference.’

Nevertheless, because we were really running out of all the things that we choose to consider necessities (milk, onions, garlic, apples, bananas, fresh vegetables of any kind), we got into the car to see whether it would succeed in the driveway and then succeed again in making a left turn onto the road in order to get us up the two blocks to the highway. The car is a 4-wheel drive Subaru Forester, but it doesn’t have snow tires and we don’t own chains, so it has to do what it can. It could, although it was having a little trouble in the driveway snow if Ed was urging it to take anything but the path of least resistance. Then it didn’t make the turn up the road to the highway. Instead, it wanted to take the turn down the road to the minor highway. The alternative was straight ahead into the big ditch. Down the hill: better choice.

Then, the next problem. This road has maybe 20 houses off it, but the steepest part of the road is at the bottom, and down at this part there are only us and one neighbor house. All the neighbors above us were going up the road, so not much traffic had made it as far down as our driveway. Thus, on the last downhill stretch, which we were on, the snow was still pretty well gathered where it had fallen. We made our way down that 600 yards an inch at a time, the car insisting all the way that there was actually plenty of stuff to slide around in. Then, at the bottom, there was the absolutely cleaned up minor highway. Having achieved that, I returned to breathing, and there we were, speeding to the world.

A few groceries, an audio splitter for the computer in order to use my new Bluetooth headphones in the most flexible way, and a 15-minute entertainment walk around the local Liquidation World, and I was more than ready to get back in the car and go home. Amazing number of people out there at the mall, with as many shopping bags in their hands as I imagine they had in all the days before Christmas. And lots of goods still to buy. Really, way too much to look at. No nice white cleanliness and purity.

Even in just twelve days in forced hibernation, I felt like I’d kind of lost contact with the world as it really is, the world of too much that I both long for when I don’t have access to it and am put off by when I do. I wonder if the bear, now in his hibernation, is dreaming about his ambivalent relationship to the world of human food scraps that he loves to mess with and the sight of the owners of those food scraps, the humans he could happily do without.

Birds in the Hand

We don’t much feed birds in the summer because (a) they can find their own food; and (b) since we come and go, we’d just as soon they not get used to our providing their food; and (c) the bear is perfectly crazy about bird food in the form of seeds, not birds. In the winter, it’s another matter, but only if a lot of snow or very low temperatures are involved. Then we feed them on an emergency basis, figuring they won't get entirely used to the idea that they aren’t going to have to do their own foraging the rest of the time.

This past ten days, now, it has been steady snow and very low temperatures, so it’s bird feeding time. Of course, because we don’t usually feed them, they don’t know to come to our house for food and we don't get very many of them. On the first morning of the snow storm, we put out sunflower seed under the carport, which was protected from snow, but saw nary a bird for at least 48 hours. Then a single song sparrow showed up, although it didn’t exactly look like one: much bigger because his feathers were so puffed up to prevent heat loss. He didn’t mind us watching him from behind the door or even talking to one another (normally, they move away even if they’re not eating the second they’re aware of us). I guess that’s a situation in which concentrating on food seems like a very good idea.

By the fourth day, a second song sparrow had joined in the eatery work and the next day a rufous-sided towhee (perhaps literally) blew in. They all looked so cold and so needy. It made me feel like I ought to at least open the door and invite them into the front hall to stay. But opening the door would indeed cause them to fly away.

Birds eat and eat and eat. And they kept it up. Yesterday, day nine, a second towhee arrived. And today, day 10, all four were here for continued Boxing Day eating. The snow was back, too. We all six of us (counting Ed) spent the day at home, sort of. Food being available here, but no Boxing Day shopping at all.
(The photo is the song sparrow, taken through the window and in very dim light.)

'Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind'

That’s what tonight promises us. We normally don’t get much snow in the winter, or very low temperatures, but we always get big wind. But tonight they are promising all three for our dining and dancing entertainment. The most immediate worry about a big wind storm is that we’ll lose the power and whether I’m in Roberts Creek in B.C., or in Point Roberts in WA, my locale will pretty much be the end of the list of places whose power needs to be and gets repaired. We have gas heat and cooking at both places, which is a very good feature, but we don’t have gas-powered internet or lighting.

No internet can be tolerated, I believe on principle, but the fact is I’m awfully used to just having it instantly and constantly available. No electric lights, on the other hand, is a little harder with the days being so short. But candles and propane lamps and flashlights are perfectly tolerable substitutes if it doesn’t go on for too long. I think the longest we’ve been without power in the past 16 years is about 3 days after one storm. Irritating, not desirable, but endurable. Some people seem very enthusiastic about generator backups (which are pretty pricey), but I’ve never found it necessary, probably because I don’t keep tons of food in the freezer.

The real thing to worry about is trees falling and big branches breaking off. The latter is particularly worrisome when the temperature is so low because the trees will have zero flexibility, will be very brittle. Both our houses are surrounded by many tall trees and the firs’ and maples’ branches, in particular, are prone to crashing down in big wind storms. Last winter, two of our neighbors had large branches come through their roofs. This is not good in a very big way, even if you are not in the room where it comes through to. Lots of people address this problem by cutting all the trees down on their property. They move up here because they love the trees, but they aren’t up to having them on their property. Good of us to keep them available for their scenery requirements. We can think of our place as a kind of tree zoo, I guess.

But at this moment, you just do what you can. I ground a container of coffee beans because we also don’t have a gas-powered coffee grinder. I put out the candles and matches and oil and propane lamps so they are readily available. Put my tiny flashlight in my pocket. And that’s about it. Ten o’clock tonight is the expected time of arrival. I’ll just go to bed then, anyway, and sleep through it, maybe. That would be good.

As Shakespeare reminded us, though, all those centuries ago:

"Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho! the holly!
This life is most jolly. “

If I’m gone for a few days, you’ll know that life has just gotten very jolly.

Living in the Dark, with Color

Once you get past the border, what is Point Roberts like? Do the thousand regulars just collapse on their couches having gotten through it one more time? Of course, many of the thousand regulars aren’t actually there right now. In the summer time, the regular Canadian cottagers pour over the borders, and in the fall, they pour back into Canada. And as it gets a little colder, many of the American (theoretically) full-time residents start pouring south to someplace warmer in the ROA (rest of America). Point Roberts has no employment to speak of but the reason that that doesn’t matter so much to its permanent residents is that they are largely retired. And the folks who stick it out from November to March seem to be Canadians with green cards who live in Pt. Roberts and work somewhere else (often movie people in the Vancouver industry), retirees who don’t have jobs and have grown weary of travel (like me and Ed), and people who work locally at the grocery store, the real estate sales offices, the gas stations, the liquor store, or have pretty small home businesses—cleaning, flowers, maintenance, carpentry, or, increasingly, internet businesses.

In real winter time (say, December), it gets dark at 4 in the afternoon if it’s a heavily cloudy day, and it usually is. You come on to the Point and it looks as if the entire place has been closed down. The vast majority of houses and cottages are dark, and the only cars are the ones that are lined up at the border. The border station itself and grocery store have a big light presence, as do the FIVE gas stations (all on the main street), but otherwise, not much. (Remember, there are almost no street lights and only two flashing traffic lights.) So it’s dark, and cold and lonely feeling, and probably windy, and definitely wet. I LOVE it! I think this is what is meant by being away from the madding crowd. It’s not just the feeling of isolation; it is also the redundant wetness: the ground is wet, the plants are wet, the air is wet, the ocean is wet, the roof, skylights, and deck of the house is wet. Inside, there’s a nice fire going and it’s pretty warm for a moderately insulated house. Inside it’s home, but outside, too. For people who have lived almost all their lives in high and low deserts (me) and low deserts (Ed), it’s like being re-hydrated after a very long dry spell. And it is blessedly quiet, even though we are just south of the Vancouver airport.

It is true that it is hard being away from the sun for such long periods of time. Yet, yet, the saturation of color provided by a northwestern cloudy day is spectacular. You can hardly keep your eyes off the outdoors. There are a million green colors even in the winter; the Icelandic ponies that are abundant in fields about have extraordinarily rich brown and reddish coats. The tree bark of small forest areas wants you not only to look at it but also to touch it to see if its green and grey and orange lichens are as tactile as they appear, and they are. It is an absolute visual wonder, even in winter. In spring, in summer, in fall, even more so, and each is a very different kind of look. I think it is in great part so astonishing because its variety is so subtle and so coherent. The big contrasts that are inherent in a man-made environment are simply not here. There is nothing much around that is man-made, other than houses that are, for the most part, and certainly on our street, pretty much one with the environment. Older houses in Point Roberts tend to just collapse into the background. (Sometimes literally, and from that fact emerged my series of 17 sizable wall quilts, ‘Abandoned Houses of Point Roberts.’ ) There is something strangely satisfying about the thought that you can have a little house and when you are through with it, it will go back to where it came from.