MUDDSCAPE

As we careen down the road toward our BTE (Big Trip East), lots of preparation is going on. Lots of it is stuff we wouldn’t think of if a deadline wasn’t prowling around waiting to slap us in the face in a couple of months, and as a result a long list is developing. We crossed one of those items off the list this week and it coincidentally is also one of my Bucket List items, so a big double GoodOnYa for us!

It’s likely, unless you are our age (or so), you have never seen Gilligan’s Island on TV. It’s a story about a “3-hour cruise” that results in an island shipwreck that went on for many seasons and featured a cast of characters that included First Mate Gilligan (Bob Denver), the Skipper (too), a millionaire and his wife, a movie star, the Professor and Mary Ann, all on Gilligan’s Isle! You can find the music lyrics online to fact-check all of this but be warned it’s a vicious ear worm tune. It was a cute show, and slapstick funny, but the most salient lore that fell out of it was the age-old “Ginger or Mary Ann” question that has vexed many of us, especially guys, for decades. Ginger was the sexy, glamorous Movie Star in the tight long white gown, while Mary Ann was from Kansas, a perky, ponytailed, tight short-shorts Girl Next Door. You get the picture, or if you don’t you can stop reading right here.

I’ve failed to come to grips with an answer to that question all my life. Perhaps I don’t WANT to come to an answer, because that would be the end of it. But I think I have come to a compromise. Several years ago, we took our boat, the Knot Done Yet, up to Canada, staying in the very posh Van Isle Marina near Sidney B.C. because we couldn’t get a space in the much cheaper municipal marina. The space they reserved for us was a “small space”, suitable for a “smaller yacht”. We checked in, and a nice dockmaster in a dinghy escorted us to the slip, which turned out to be 60 feet deep and 20 feet wide, considerably larger than our little 27’ speedboat. Our boat wasn’t quite yet a yacht, although it aspired to be one when it grew up, and we felt slightly self-conscious in the shade of the much, much larger (and taller) True Yachts that surrounded us.

That feeling quickly vanished when a parade of captains of many of these True Yachts started slowly walking by to admire the sleek lines of our “sports boat”. When one, who was very likely voyeuristically reliving his past, asked “How fast is that thing?”, we realized that while his True Yacht was several orders of magnitude larger in tonnage to ours, ours was nearly a full order of magnitude faster than his. Game, set, match. In a world where size obviously matters, we had managed to establish Mariner Equality. We became accepted members of the True Yacht crowd for the rest of the weekend.

We were taking advantage of the Beverly Hills of marinas by walking the gangways and admiring all of our new BFF’s boats, when we came across two slips. One was empty, and the one next to it had a smart True Yacht:

My immediate thought was “Where is Mary Ann?”. I quickly became convinced that this particular Captain was the fanciful owner of TWO True Yachts, obviously, and the missing one just had to be Mary Ann. This genius had solved his Gilligan’s Isle choice crisis by opting for BOTH! And obviously spent half of his time with one, the other half two-timing with the other. Brilliant! And thus, the root of my Bucket List obsession was planted. I resolved myself to one day achieving that same solution. I would own TWO True Yachts, with the same naming convention, and split my time between my marine mistresses.

A few years have passed, and Daddy Warbucks hasn’t yet knocked on my door with the financing for this dream, but I managed to get to a slightly downsized resolution. Way back in the first paragraph, I mention our preparation for the BTE. That preparation involved acquiring 2 kayaks of a specific length such that they could be carried on the rear deck of our travel trailer, exactly 8 feet, giving us the ability to splash about with all of nature in the southern waterways along our BTE path. They are identical, and while not True Yachts, they are boats, they float, and better yet, they have space for a name! So, with help from Wendy’s Cricut (a marvelous little machine that she will soon wear out, I’m sure), we christened them!

I feel a sense of immense accomplishment. True to my expectations, our True Yacht (at least in my head) kayaks have fulfilled a dream for me. These two miraculous adventure machines will, of course, have prominent appearances in future blogs, unless they, along with us, get consumed by a Gator named Gilligan. I’ll be in the market for a guest blogger for THAT installment!

To that end, Tippie has some advice (doesn’t he always?).

It’s been quite a while since the last post, in March, where we got to watch people blow something up. That’s hard to top on my playlist, but it isn’t why content has been thin (and thin is being generous!). We haven’t done a ton of camping, and what we have done has been unremarkable. But this last weekend, that changed.

Most don’t yet know this, but we are retiring (again!) in the Spring of 2022. Unsure where we wanted to retire, we took a few scouting trips and found a perfect match in Palm Coast, Florida (www.palmcoast.gov). Located on the St. John’s River along the northeast coast of the state, between Daytona Beach and St. Augustine (the oldest city in America), the weather is temperate, and the town and locals are amazing. Although we toured at least a half-dozen of the cities in the general area of the coast, we kept being drawn back to how clean Palm Coast was. We never saw any graffiti, or any blue tarp homeless encampments. Apparently between the excellent city services, and the strong church community, folks who have fallen a few pegs on their luck find services at the community, and sometimes neighborhood level, to keep them going. It’s very refreshing. And it doesn’t hurt that we could easily afford to acquire a home and live there on our retirement budget. We wanted to stay near a coast, and the West Coast didn’t offer a solution, but this East Coast locale is just right.

After a thorough search of the area, and with the luxury of months until we needed it, we opted to purchase a very affordable, buildable lot (a corner, about 1/3 of an acre), and hired a contractor to build a house to our liking. All in, it will cost about ¼ of the same house in our current location in Washington.

In the Spring, when we do finally hang up the spurs at work, we will make our way cross-country in our travel trailer to get to our new home, a trip of about 4,400 miles. It will take a month, and it will give fistfuls of opportunities to blog away at all the amazing things we plan to see. Stops at Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, Mt. Rushmore, Carlsbad Caverns, Memphis, Nashville, Asheville, and Savannah, and many small cities in between. So, stay tuned.

But enough about next year. How about last weekend? For Christmas, we decided to find a nice destination for a trip with the trailer. We had been watching the weather and planning a 2-day trailer camping trip to Deception Pass State Park for Christmas day. It was forecasting “snow showers” and temps in the high 20’s, and we figured that wasn’t too bad, so off we went at noon on Christmas Day. We got set up in the campground with some flakes swirling, but no accumulation, and were very cozy all night. We both got an amazing night’s sleep because it was s o o o quiet. There were very few campers, to be expected. And we got a few snow showers, as we also expected. All very pleasant.

We woke up Sunday morning to about 3-4″ of accumulated snow, still not enough to change our minds. We’ve camped a few times in blizzards when we were living in our RV; this wasn’t anywhere near as bad as that.

We had come to relax, read, and do jigsaw puzzles, and that’s what we commenced to do.

However, about noon, our water pump quit. Since the mis-forecast temperature was below 20 degrees, I assumed the water lines or pump froze, or the pump just quit working. The State Parks leave the electricity hookups live during the winter but shut off the running water. So, we were at the mercy of our onboard supply and pump. Without running water, we decided to call it quits and packed up to head home. Our “winter camping trip” had a little too much Winter.

We scraped snow and ice off everything as well as we could, got hooked up, and headed out. 200 yards down the road we took a tight left turn and, not realizing how frozen the dirt road was under the snow, we got stuck climbing a small hill when I stupidly stopped to take off my coat in the now-very-warm truck cab. Only we didn’t stop. We slid about 20 yards backward down the icy grade and came to a stop at the curve at the bottom, luckily still in a straight line, and luckily not contacting any trees or other park infrastructure. But we weren’t going anywhere. Even with 4-wheel drive, we didn’t have enough traction to get the trailer going up the hill, and couldn’t maneuver to try and back down the road. It’s 1 PM, we’re stuck, on a freezing Sunday, with very few folks around.

I called one tow company on Whidbey Island, and the person who answered the phone (!!) said it would be at least 6-7 hours before they could respond. We called AAA, and waited 30 minutes for an operator, who, after 20 minutes of checking this and that, told us they couldn’t do anything for us. Just as that call was winding up, a camper who was one of the Very Few, walked up and tapped on the window. He had a truck, and a winch, and might be able to help. Since we were blocking the one-way road around the campground, he went the other way around, parked just over the top of the hill facing us, and unwound his winch line toward us. It came up 15 feet short.

Luckily, he had a 20 foot tow strap in his rig, which he fetched, and we got it hooked to my front towbar on the truck (another stroke of luck, because the strap wouldn’t make it around an axle). He winched slowly, and we gave a four-wheeled assist, and got halfway up the grade to the top. He then got in his truck and backed slowly down the other side, taking us all the way to the top on level ground. We undid all the towing stuff, and now free (and profusely thanking he and his wife), we were able to creep out of the campground and back onto the state road, which was plowed and de-iced. Our seemingly dire straits took about 1 hour total to overcome. We are truly blessed, and this is an excellent reflection on the RV community, who have never failed to help us just as we would never fail to help any of them in need.

So, all in all, Christmas went well. I’m still not sure how much damage the super freeze will do to the rig over the next 3 days, but I have plenty of time in the spring for repairs before we head East.

And now, Tippy would like to help us express our gratitude to our RV Community, everywhere, for being the best Stewards of The Road.

We worked a couple of snow days in early February, days when we had so much snow we told the Assistant Managers to stay home and we would fill in. It’s a great deal for us because, hey there’s about 10” of snow out there, and we aren’t going anywhere anyway! When this happens, we then earn a few extra days off.

We added one of those days to a normal 3 day weekend and booked an RV site at Fort Worden State Park, the Beach Campground. There are 2 campgrounds at Fort Worden, a beach affair which is open and expansive, with a beach that wraps around 2 sides of the long skinny property. The other is the Upper (Forest) Campground, which has sites sprinkled among the pines and firs on the hill above the old fort. Each campground has its own charm, depending on whether you prefer a forest view or sunshine and the smell of the ocean.

We left noonish on Friday morning (our bonus day off) and drove the rig onto the Kingston Ferry, then across the Hood Canal Bridge (where we just missed a boomer missile sub transiting out to a tour in the Pacific), further on to Port Townsend and then on through to Fort Worden. With all the recent snow, the view of the Olympics from the Hood Canal Bridge was very nice.

The old fort was built as a defensive gunnery emplacement to protect Puget Sound in World War I, just in case some of the extremely distant navies of our enemies decided to invade our homeland through the Pacific Northwest. It doubled down as an improved gunnery site for World War II, with the same predictable results: not a shot was fired at the enemy (for obvious reasons). But the gunnery batteries, which still exist sans guns, are impressive. Solid concrete doesn’t even start to describe it with many of the walls seemingly feet thick, and tunnels running everywhere so the soldiers manning the guns and fetching munitions wouldn’t be subjected to enemy fire. The fort is pretty sizeable, and most of the facilities have been renovated and restored to use as a resort of sorts under the management of the Washington State Parks system.

The main fort is the long “Commons”, a grassy parade ground that is surrounded by base housing and administrative offices. The housing has been upgraded and refurbished as rental “cottages”, a few of which are 6 bedrooms, or “Condos” which are converted barracks housing. It seems like a perfect place for a large family reunion, and I’m sure it really jumps in the summer. At the ocean end of the Commons is the Beach Campground, and at the other is the Upper Campground. We walked the entire perimeter, and it’s about 2.5 miles with lots to see.

Above the fort Commons, on the bluffs to the West, are the gun batteries. Part of the fun of coming here is all the walking and hiking you can do to see all of the installations.

There is a lot of signage telling you the history of it all, and the views are spectacular. There are some interesting buildings as well, that don’t have any signs, so we can only guess what they were used for. This one sits atop the hill, so it may have been an observation post. If I was Base Commander, I would have been tempted to hang a giant target on the ocean facing side of the tower.

It rained on and off during our stay, but we caught a nice break on Sunday and opted to walk the perimeter of the park. Up a steep trail to the top of the bluff, and then west and back down to sea level where we found the old Chinese Gardens. What is now a pond used to be a drained shallow valley that was taken over by Chinese immigrants in the early 1900s. They grew produce which was then trucked into town as far away as Seattle for sale. Anti-Chinese political sentiment eventually ran all of them out of the area, and the well-tended farms fell into retirement, and eventually flooded back into a pond.

While we walked we also collected rocks and driftwood to paint, a Zen experience that is incredibly relaxing. Wendy has quite a collection from all our camping, and this time she focused on painting a landscape scene from our beach onto a piece of driftwood found on the beach.

Fort Worden sits adjacent to Port Townsend, the wooden ship capital of the Northwest. It’s an old seaport town with a decidedly Victorian flavor, and also home to two of our favorite restaurants. Breakfast was served at the Blue Moose, a smallish breakfast-and-lunch-only spot run by 2 sisters. Along with a great (big) breakfast, you get some cool antique furnishings and collectibles hung all over the walls.

Lunch was served at Sirens, right on the waterfront and up a very steep flight of stairs. The atmosphere is inviting, the views are great, and the food is wonderful. The beer mug says it all.

In between the two restaurants, we strolled through the boatyard adjacent to the Blue Moose.

They fit out some pretty big vessels here, with a monstrous “Travel Lift” that can pluck boats longer than 100’ right out of the dockside. That mystery picture above came off the front of the Red Bluff, a heavy tug. Old tires make great bumpers for big ships, I guess. We got a few pictures to give some scale to it.

Winter camping is nice without all the summer crowds. The solitude and quiet offsets the less-than-spectacular weather. Returning from our perimeter walk, we were remarking that, unlike most, there was no real highlight to this trip to anchor this blog. But we spoke too soon. On our return we noticed a growing crowd of law enforcement vehicles, lights flashing, at the entrance to the park. I initially thought a donut truck had overturned, but soon a Camp Host came banging on our door to announce that someone had found “a piece of ordnance” on the beach, and that the bomb squad had been called to clear it out. It turned out to be a WWII artillery shell, apparently still live. A few hours later Mr. Bomb Disposal showed up, and the decision was made to detonate it in place rather than move it. We had nearly a front row seat for this, and I couldn’t have been happier. In my book, any day you get to see somebody blow something up is a very good day, indeed!

We watched and waited, and soon saw Mr. BD trailing a spool of wire back from the beach, to which he attached a hand switch. And shortly after, a siren sounded and a loudspeaker barked “Fire in the hole” 3 times. A rather loud boom and plume of smoke erupted, which really was only the beginning. The loud boom was likely the explosives used by Mr. BD, which then lit the old shell propellant on fire, which created a huge cloud of smoke that engulfed the whole entrance to the park for about a half hour. It was all very exciting, and definitely worthy of being a blog anchor!

And last but never least, here’s Tippy, inspired by a handwritten sign we saw on our journey!

On our recent (July 2020) annual vacation to Orcas Island, we fished for crab as we always do, setting our 3 pots just in front of the cabins at West Beach Resort. There were monster tides during the early week, and in the first day we lost 2 of the 3 pots. Gone, can’t find them. It’s not unusual to lose a pot from time to time. Sometimes it’s an evil thing; someone who needs a pot appropriates one. Most of the time it’s just Mother Nature absconding with your gear, mostly by just submerging the floating part of your tackle in a swift tide and then weighing it down with kelp or snagging it on an undersea rock, where you can’t see or reach the floats to retrieve the pot. This is what our pots look like.

I like the rectangular wire-mesh pots because I’m old and lazy and don’t want to have to haul up an extra 20 lbs. of steel just to get at the goodies inside. The crab I catch tastes just as good. In any event, after loading the little cage inside with chicken parts (get the expired stuff from the supermarket if you can), the fisherman holds the floating part of the tackle and throws the rest overboard in a suitable spot. We like to fish about 70′ deep, ergo the 100′ long line. A few hours, or the next day, return and retrieve the pot. Crab fishermen use various configurations of the floats and colors to mark their pots so they can find them in the midst of all the others (we presume you have chosen a good spot to fish).

We choose to fish offshore of our cabin because it’s close, and we have done well there in the past.

But the particular undersea geography of the bay is both what makes it great for crab fishing, and not so great for crab-pot-keeping. The inner part of the bay is a nice large, shallow “dish” that has lots of fish and crabs, mostly small. The really delicious large male “keeper” crabs hang out on the perimeter, and that part is at the outer edge of the bay, where the large granite shelf that is the dish rapidly slopes out to the channel, reaching many hundreds of feet in depth over a small distance of less than 100 yards. So, place your pots with care, folks, or Davy Jones gets an early Christmas gift! A little bit of tidal flow, coupled with an overly-ambitious placement and you get what we got. Nada.

With only one pot left, we resorted to setting it a little farther east, in the next bay over closer to Camp Orkila, the world-renown YMCA camp. The water there has the same dish topography, but you don’t have to set close to an abyss to fish. We did well, very well in fact, feeding everyone that wanted crab, and a few neighbors to boot. We may, in fact, continue to fish there in the future.

We brought our lone pot home after vacation, and I set about buying the parts to replace at least one of them. You might notice, on close inspection, that one of the floats in my “terminal tackle” has my name, address, and phone number on it. This is a requirement in Washington, and it pays off. Out of the blue yesterday I got a phone call from an unknown number, which I ignored as I usually do (spam, aaargh!). But, just before I blocked the number, a text came in from the same phone.

25 years of fishing for crab, more than a couple of pots “lost”, and this is the first time someone else found one! (Caveat: Wendy and I actually found one of our lost pots 3 weeks after losing it, a case of a line dragged under and kelp-buried, that resurfaced). It turns out there must have been enough flotation on it that when it got pulled into the deep off of West Beach, the tide just took it away.

The journey this pot took was pretty amazing. From where it was set, it ended up 15 miles away. But, taking 3 weeks to get there, and drifting with the big tides of July and August, it could have easily traveled 2 to 3 times that far in it’s journey.

It’s kind of amazing to me that it never got hung up on anything traveling through all the channels it had to traverse.

We’re happy to have a great story, and we’re happy for the wayward pot to find a new owner! And we’re going to add some additional “terminal tackle” just as additional insurance for our future fishing! We bought a couple of bright fluorescent orange flotation balls that will get clipped to the smaller floats. We’ll keep you posted.

Tippy has his own ideas.

Patience is a virtue, so they say. And I now know who are the all-time Patience Supremes. Hippies. I mean, here we are almost 60 years after the Age of Aquarius, and what do we have? When pot is legal and haircuts aren’t, the Hippies have won. I have nothing against hippies, just like I never had anything against J. Edgar Hoover. But I don’t cross-dress, and I don’t like my hair long. So there.

Okay, now that I have that out of my system, on to better things. It looks like we were way ahead of the curve when we got our newest travel trailer. There is a huge rush on the market for RV’s and boats right now. Folks that might have once jumped on a plane to take their family somewhere nice for a vacation are now thinking better of it. They are buying up motorhomes, travel trailers, pop-up campers, and boats like there is no tomorrow. Many places are so low on inventory they simply can’t stay open until the factories catch up. They are now calling RV’s “Covid Campers”.

We lugged our Covid Camper up to Mt. St. Helens for the Memorial Day weekend. We have talked for years about going there, and I guess we finally got the talking part completely done. Of course, all the State Campgrounds were closed, as were all the State and National park offices and Visitor Centers, but we found a nice private RV park right on the shores of Silver Lake with the volcano in sight farther up the Toutle River Valley. Silver Lake RV Resort has a little marina, and a small hotel that hangs out over the lake. They advertise that you can fish “right off your balcony”, and we saw people doing just that.

We arrived Saturday afternoon, and there was rain forecast for the weekend, but Sunday would have none of that. A bright and early breakfast, and we headed out toward the north side of the large blast zone, intent on making our way up to the Johnson Observatory. We were very keen to get a first-hand look at the destruction done on May 18, 1980, when the mountain finally blew after several small eruptions, and lots of shaking. Jean Sherrard, a photographer and journalist, photographed the mountain in 1979 from the far side of Spirit Lake, and had recently trekked back to almost the same spot to take an “after” picture of the mountain. I superimposed his “before” (the ghosted image) onto his latest picture to give you an idea of how much of this mountain went kablooey. It lost 1300 feet off the top, gone in the large explosion and blown into smaller sized debris. But much more material was lost in the 3 near simultaneous landslides that took most of the northern face. They call each slide a “Block”: Block 1 was the topsoil and surface “crust”, and it broke free when the explosion happened, then slid down the mountain at 180 mph, and twisting sideways on its path. Block 2 was the underlying rock shell of the mountain, and it broke loose 2 seconds later. Because it had much more density, it soon overtook Block 1, splitting it in half and shoving the two halves up the walls of the canyon through which the Toutle River was flowing. Block 3 was the old volcanic core of the mountain, and it broke loose seconds later and shoved Block 2 farther on, filling in the gaping hole the first 2 blocks left behind. The whole mess of debris stretched 14 miles down the Toutle River Valley when it was all over. Of course, there was a tremendous volume of ash and volcanic pumice that was also released.

We drove as far as the road would take us, and when we got to the closed gates for Johnson Observatory, we discovered a hike through the debris field called The Hummocks Trail, a 2.5 mile hike into the debris field of the landslides. Scientists discovered something interesting while studying the changing landscape in the wake of the eruption; these “hummock” debris fields are pretty common around explosive volcanoes. They never knew before how common they are, because they never had such a good “before” and “after” picture of a massive volcanic explosion.

The trail leads to many overlook points where a spectacular view can be had of the gaping hole left in the mountain.

We happily trekked onto the trail, through the trees, past the small ponds, until we got to a sign that informed us that, on May 17, 1980, we would have been standing 300 feet in the air at the spot of the sign. Everything around us was new landscape. Called the “hummocks” because it is literally piles of debris that has eroded down somewhat due to nature, and has been covered with the usual blanket: trees, bushes, moss, grass, flowers, all the stuff we usually took for granted on our hike. We saw it all now with a whole new appreciation.

The trail winds over small hills and ravines, with lots of rocks and gravel everywhere. I can only imagine what it would have looked like 40 years ago, with all this stuff either roaring down the canyon at hundreds of miles per hour, or raining from the skies. But we did take it in with great appreciation for the power of nature, and the speed at which Mom Nature operates.

There are many small ponds along the trail, way too numerous to count. Signs informed us that these ponds, and the water that feeds them, are the real culprits for the changing landscape. As rain percolates from above, and the natural snow-melt-fed water table slithers from below, all of these ponds grow and collapse, creating new ravines, and new ponds, and new cliffs, and new micro slides that just keep the whole mess changing until it probably becomes a valley floor once again thousands of years from now. We saw ample evidence of pond breakouts and small slides.

Spirit Lake, at the foot of the mountain, was at first emptied of water, then filled with debris from the blast, mostly trees and rocks. The blast itself pushed the water of the lake into an 800 foot tall “tsunami” that washed up the face of the east cliff, scouring all of the trees and vegetation off of it, which then washed back into the lake. Then ash filled that up. But you can’t stop Mom Nature. Over a comparatively short time, the lake appeared again, and has returned today to become again the headwaters of the Toutle River. And water is a mighty force. The river has, like the Grand Canyon, carved out a channel in all the debris and ash, and flows down the old canyon toward the ocean once again. It’s crazy how fast this stuff happens.

We will go back to see much more, especially when all of the attractions are open again. But you can take this with you for the time being: when you next hike down a trail something like this, appreciate that it could have been here for eons, or just a few decades. You will definitely see your surroundings in a new light!

Tippy always gets the last word.