I opened my front door to the quietest of knocks. Our six-year-old son waited with a stranger. My heart raced at the realization of what could have happened while he stood, wondered where I was, and walked the half mile from the bus stop to our house by himself. It was a Monday. And I’d …
Category Archives: Reading
Sisters, a Trail Run Along a Road, and Some Stuff About Gravity
Gravity. It’s not something most of us spend much time thinking about, including me, until this summer, when I read Chuck Klosterman’s essay collection But What If We’re Wrong? It begins (p 3), ‘Like most people, I like to think of myself as a skeptical person. But I’m pretty much in the tank for gravity. It’s …
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Ten Books Islanders Ought to Read
Exploring Deception Pass by Jack Hartt This week, Jack Hartt’s new book Exploring Deception Pass was published. A recent Whidbey News Times Article by Ron Newberry on the subject (State park manager shares tales and insight) suggests, “When one of Washington’s most breathtaking state parks is part of your everyday life for 12 years, you tend to …
Traversing the Tursi Trail
A pair of butterflies (possibly Papilio rutulus) fluttered along beside me as I neared the Tursi Trail head along Donnell Road on Fidalgo Island a few weeks ago. As I began my hike along the dusty trail, a garter snake slithered off to safety. Thimble berries and trailing blackberries lined the primitive path during the first …
Leave it to Beavers
Hear that sound? It’s a call to action for North America’s largest rodent to make it stop: running water. Of all of the species of rodents in the world, Castor canadensis is second in size only to Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris, the capybara. My curiosity about this creature began while I was running. During a morning trail …
“All That the Rain Promises and More”
A barred owl’s call lured me into the woods yesterday evening near Heart Lake in the Anacortes Forest Lands. “Who cooks for you. Who cooks for you all,” provides the correct pattern of this species of owl’s call, but it doesn’t do justice to the super soft, spectacular sound. I grabbed my camera and headed out …
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
When our son was eleven, we agreed to get him a dog. I had in mind a quiet, loving, sweet-tempered, mid-sized creature that would race to the door to greet him, wag its tail often, walk obediently by his side, sleep at the foot of his bed and spend a little time on my lap. …
Channeling Frederick
Frederick, the title character of one of Leo Lionni’s many wonderful children’s books, is a mouse that seems to be daydreaming and shirking his preparing-for-the-winter-months duties while his mice friends work. But when winter comes, he does his part by sharing the memories he collected and lifting their spirits. Last week Tuesday while others in …
Wild About the Islands’ Flowers
Two years ago, I came upon a plant while doing what else, running, on the Lighthouse Point trail in Deception Pass State Park. I had never seen the flower before but suspected it was an orchid. I was right. It was a Calypso bulbosa, common name: Fairy slipper orchid. From that day forward, this plant …
Guemes Channel Trail and Ship Harbor Interpretive Preserve
Last week, for the first time, I walked a recently-opened mile-long section of the Guemes Channel Trail in Anacortes, which will eventually connect to the Tommy Thompson Trail. I also visited the nearby Ship Harbor Interpretive Preserve, which is accessible from the end of a little cul de sac that can be reached from Oakes Road (to Glasgow Way …
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