Dungeness Spit

The name sounds like expectoration from some ancient Cretaceous beast.  In a way it’s true because two tongues of land, moving and growing, extend into the Strait of San De Fuca, near Port Angeles, Washington, caused by strong natural forces.  In these aerial photos, see the Port Angeles harbor and the “breakwater” around it.  It’s a natural spit protecting ferries sailing to Victoria, Canada, across the Strait.  To the east of Port Angeles, see Dungeness Spit.  (Click any picture to enlarge it.)

Dungeness Spit

It was formed by ocean tides and waves in the Strait of San De Fuca, that wide connecting throat between the Pacific Ocean and its great inland extension, called Puget Sound.  Every day, and usually twice a day, tides force a huge flow of ocean water into and out of Puget Sound, which acts like a huge breathing lung.  Over thousands of years these flows, aided by storms, have created Port Angeles Harbor and Dungeness Spit.  

From the ridge top looking down on the Spit it is easy to imagine severe weather, strong currents, and high tides that formed it.  Huge logs are piled on its shore, and many cubic miles of glacial deposits have been moved from the shore far out into the Strait.  

Extending five miles from shore, the Spit can be walked its entire length, but not always.  Only when tide is low and waves are mild can a person expect to return the way she came, or return at all.    

Once out on the Spit, I look back, southward, to the Olympic Mountains and deep snow that I came to see.  Actually, there is only one-fourth of average snow accumulation this year, and getting there might have been disappointing.  

It’s hard to imagine huge trees floating in from the Ocean or out from the Sound and being washed onto this narrow Spit, while elsewhere along the shore of the Strait, few big logs are seen.  Yet their artforms against the sky speak of power and fragility, a small finger of land grasping what a hard rocky shore could not.   

In case you have wondered whether those ocean trash pictures we have all bee seeing on PBS are real, manufacture, or isolated, here are two examples of trash washed up on Dungeness Spit.  Those small white things are plastic. 

On this wild and barren strip of sand, cobles, and logs, no one can live permanently, but still it needs a ruler, and today I met King Seagull, ruler of Dungeness Spit.  

So it was, while returning to Port Angeles, Washington, to see the average 38 feet of snow at Hurricane Ridge that I walked on Dungeness Spit instead, because the road to Hurricane Ridge was closed, and conditions on the Spit were perfect.

Michael Angerman has prepared an interactive map showing my nightly stops.   Michael's Map      Please open the map and notice it showing my current location in Corvallis, Oregon, where I am enjoying a visit with Michael and Michele before heading back home to Pasadena. 

This will be my last blog post.  Thanks to all of you who have followed and have given interesting comments.  Until next trip, farewell, or see you soon.  

Sharon    

The Little Death

Several weeks ago, when I visited Sharon Rizk in Pecos, New Mexico, I walked with her neighbors, walking their dogs, in the snow each morning.  One of them said, “I’m tired of snow.”  But I knew I had not seen the worst of it.   

Later in Iowa and northern Minnesota, I heard comments from locals implying that winter is a drab place of blacks and whites and dreary grays.  “March usually brings warmings,” said Jerry Netland, owner of the Voyageur Motel

People who live in the far north don’t go out much, and they sleep more.  Some of them brave the cold for the pure joy of it, but not most.  They stay inside and make things or talk about spring, but they don’t go outside much, except in their cars.  Maybe that’s why they call winter “The little death.”  People in warmer climates use that expression in other ways, but in the far north it seems to fit.   

In Butte, Montana, I saw the first copper mine of 1878 that started a pollution problem that Superfunds are still trying to clean up. 

And this open pit copper mine is still in operation, though supposedly not harming the environment as the first hundred years of mining this mountain did.   

Looking back on that venture into the far north, I shushed through the snow for a while, and now it is over.  Arriving in eastern Washington, was like sighting land after crossing an ocean.  It’s fifty degrees here with no ice, no snow, except on distant mountains. Yesterday, the huge Coeur d'Alene Lake had no ice, and Canadian geese looked happy.   

I am now in Pacific time zone, just a day’s drive from Port Angeles, where I spent a month last September and October.  I hope to see if the sign at Hurricane Ride is really true.

Michael Angerman has prepared an interactive map showing my nightly stops.     Michael's Map  

Westward

North Dakota, Interstate 94—straight, cold, windy and clear.

Yellowstone River at Glendive, Montana

Michael Angerman has prepared an interactive map showing my nightly stops.     Michael's Map    

Wind from the north drives powder across the road where highs stay below zero.  Overcast but very little falling snow.   

Badlands of western North Dakota, weather remains good these first two days.

Montana farmland and clear skies.  It wouldn’t seem so cold if the incessant wind did not cut through every snowy walk.  

A Final Romp in the Ice Box

“Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer.” Reads a T-shirt worn by an older woman in the Border Bar at Frostbite Falls. 

Old folks don’t move away from the coldest spot in the lower 48 states to retire in Pasadena or Miami, not even for the winter.  Some do, but you’d not suspect it at the Border Bar on Sunday evening.  

A man came and sat between me and a big bushy man at the bar.  That’s him in the red baseball cap.  

After a friendly brush with the big man, Ray, who knows almost everyone in the bar, opened a little chat with me.  Then he left and danced with half a dozen woman friends, greeting and chatting as he moved among the crowd, before returning to his beer at the bar beside me.  The woman in the white top, dancing with Ray is 93 years old. 

As we got acquainted, he started introducing me as his woman from California.  I smiled and gestured in agreement, playing along with his ruse.  And then he danced with me.  

Ray is 82 and dances with two artificial knees, two artificial hips and pacemaker for his heart.  He walks his dog two or three miles every morning no matter the temperature.

The entertainer, seen in the background of the previous pictures is Pat Porter, age 84.  He sings, plays piano and guitar, manages his back-up recordings and sound system without any help, and does it better than any country performer I know. 

I left Frostbit Falls this morning and drove southwesterly on country roads with falling snow.  As cars came in the opposite direction, they made small blizzards of the powder, but I met so few of them that it didn’t disturb the beauty of this Minnesota winter.  I wore that smile you see in the picture with Ray as I drove, because it seemed needed in the falling snow, and when the snow stopped, it seemed needed to compliment the open white fields and farmhouses where old people live.  I was a child in his arms as we danced.

Visiting the Cold

After one of the warmest Januaries on record, February is proceeding with below normal temperatures, above normal wind, and about normal snowfall.  It was minus twenty this morning with some wind on the flag out front.  Two more inches drifted onto my deck in the night, ignoring the protecting roof, swirling right under it.   Wind has whipped up the flakes and formed them into little drifts that look like white sand dunes.    

I had a notion while growing up in Pasadena that people from cold climates like this, came to my hometown to retire and get old.  Our city ranked right up there with Miami and Phoenix according to my parents and their friends.  If eastern immigrants did not move permanently, then they came for the winter.  I imagined places like Chicago and Staten Island filled with young winterphobes, surviving and saving for the day they could come to us.  We listened to stories of ice and snow, told at church socials by old folks who had left all that.

And which old-timer is riding a fat-tire bicycle?

But I was wrong.  Or maybe I judged a population from an atypical sample—judged northerners from a few westerners who believed that way.  Here in the “Icebox of the Nation,” I meet, not so many young and wistful, as a preponderance or wrinkled skin and gray hair.  I meet old-timers who might go to Phoenix for Christmas or to visit their kids, then gladly return home for another real winter.  

Keeping one’s driveway and walkways free from snow is an art form, having ranges of quality and individual taste among the old.  I can almost hear Mrs. Jones say, “My walk is lovely and walkable, almost as she might say, “My quilt is unique and I finished it with a pleasant ruffle.”  She has shoveled down to the concrete, and now her desalting chemical is melting away the last of it.  

You remember Sandy, the namesake and owner of Sandy’s Place—long single braid, thin and strong, fast as a hockey player.  I am slower to learn about people like her than they are to discover me.  Isn’t that a fine fate for one who came here ten years ago to observe, blend in, and write an outsider’s view of Frostbite Falls?  And now ten years later, Sandy is not going anywhere, and today her daughter, Katrina, who greeted me almost every morning ten years ago, has returned from Minneapolis for the weekend.  Neither of them hopes to move very far.  

On the way home I step in the same snow-holes I made going, now dusted with a new inch.  It’s intoxicating to swish along on flat white, only my tracks, just white, step after step.  I mean intoxicating in a drunken way, sometimes almost falling because “up” seems a nebulous concept when surrounded by white.  It must be like vertigo that pilots get when everything looks the same from their cockpit window.  Of course, falling on ten inches of snow, underlain with grass, is nothing but silly fun, so different from a fall on ice, which can break a hip. 

I walked three miles to Ranier again today, following the bike trail, now a blanket of snow.  My destination was the warmth of Grandma’s Pantry, the only eating place in Ranier in 2009.  Here is Grandma, as I knew her then, resting after the morning rush, after thirty years in Ranier running this lovely place.  Her daughter did most of the work then, but Grandma was clearly the matriarch, and her wild rice pancakes are legendary.

You can make them, Grandma told me, but it takes a helper and a canoe.  One person paddles or poles into shallows where the wild rice grows.  The other bends the stalks into the canoe and knocks the grains off.  Back at the rice camp, you roast the grain over an open fire.  Now you are ready to remove the hulls by tramping with your bare feet and then tossing into the air where wind carries away the chaff.  Or you can get one-third cup of raw wild rice from Grandma.  Add a cup of water and simmer for twenty minutes.  Pour off the water and add two tablespoons of sour cream, two tablespoons of butter, a cup of milk, and one egg.  In another container, mix a cup of flour, a quarter teaspoon of salt, a tablespoon of baking powder and a tablespoon of sugar.  Now pour the first mix into the dry ingredients and beat until smooth.  Makes about ten pancakes. 

But today Grandma is not around anymore, neither is Grandma’s Pantry—taken over by a modern deli that does not serve wild rice pancakes.  

February 14, 2020

December 10, 2009

On the way I took this picture where I had taken several in 2009-10.  Not much has changed.  Even two troubled trees hang in there.

Much is covered under this blank page. 

I have stood here and seen it. 

Most is not remembered,

but one thing pokes through and

casts its shadow on all that might be written here.  

Michael Angerman has prepared an interactive map of my trip showing daily locations.  Please see Michael’s Map:    Michael's Map