Keep on truckin'

This got a little stream-of-consciousness and has almost nothing to do with anything nautical... you can choose to keep reading along, or not, I'm not promising it will ever improve in quality or arrive at a particular point.

So, I haven't wanted to say anything until the ink is dry, but there is something like a 99% likelihood that we have finally got our house rented out. Mandy is going to collect the first check tomorrow; when it clears, I'll consider it official.

But the upshot of that, other than that we can stop bleeding dollars on a mortgage payment for a place we aren't living in, is that we have to get it completely cleaned out finally before the 12/01 move-in date. We'd left some furniture there that we had been trying to sell (it's easier to find buyers for that sort of thing in town than out here in the sticks), but it hasn't sold, and the new renters have plenty of their own stuff they'd like to move in instead. So, a trip to town with the truck was called for; we took it in for Thanksgiving, before we even had a clue it was going to rent, and had already grabbed part of the stuff, but there was another load left and I picked today to pick it up.

I wanted to get going early, figuring traffic might get bad at the end of the holiday weekend. Driving around through Tacoma is, economically, pretty much a wash most of the time... gas costs about as much as a ferry ticket, and unless you time the ferry perfectly it's about the same length of time to get there. But with a load of stuff, mileage costs more than the ferry, so "early" meant an early ferry. There is a 0520 and a 0700 from Bainbridge on Sunday; it's about an hour to the ferry from here, so I would have to leave at either 0415 or 0600. I have been fighting off Mandy's cold, so I set the alarm for 0530 and figured I would catch the seven o'clock and it wouldn't be too busy.

As it happened, though, I couldn't sleep much last night, and I happened to roll over and look at the clock just after four. So I got up and headed out.

After about a mile, I realized I hadn't turned the alarm off and it was going to wake Mandy up early (bad, because of that cold and all). Irrationally, my first thought was to call her so she could turn it off, but eventually I realized there wasn't anything to do about it and just kept going.

I got to Winslow with about five minutes to spare, but to my surprise, traffic was stacked up past the light and only trickling in. I started to get nervous, imagining sitting around in the cold, dim parking lot for an hour and a half, but when I finally inched up to the booth the ferry was still there. The toll-taker, frazzled, was talking on the radio saying, "I'm going to let a few more through and that's it, they're still stacked up out there." Turned out it was the day of the Seattle Marathon; all the runners from the peninsula were heading over to make the start time. WSF had neglected to staff for it; I was one of the last aboard, and the ferry pulled out 80% empty with cars still stacked up way up the hill in Winslow, because there was only one toll-collecter on duty.

A private business, you'd have to think, hey, once it's clear you're not going to get everyone through the line, just wave the rest through and load as many as you can before the departure time (which has to be held firm, lest the schedule be off for the rest of the day). You are just ticking people off at that point, an empty ferry, empty parking lot, a lot of folks waiting. But it's the state, of course they're not going to do the smart thing. Actually, now that I think about it, from a certain perspective the state should be more willing to let people through... most of us pay taxes, so in essence we've paid at least part of our way on the subsidized service.

But of course no government worker is going to default on the side of service over adherence to regulation, so the boat left mostly empty.

Anyway, I got to the house ridiculously early and had to load a bedroom set, a weight bench, and other miscellaneous junk as quietly as possible so as not to wake the neighbors. I got most of the stuff; the weights I had to leave (boarded up out of reach of the four-year old and dog who will be occupying the place... geez, I was worried that Mandy forgot to ask for an additional deposit on account of the dog, but the toddler will probably do more damage anyway) since the only spot I had left for them was concentrated in the back corner of the bed and unbalanced the load too badly. Try loading and unloading 200 pounds of cast iron weights in the dark without making a racket! I think I managed it, though, no lights came on.

After that it was a pretty easy trip back; I had good ferry luck on the return trip, too, didn't wait more than ten minutes. A bungie snapped somewhere along the way and a back corner of my tarp shredded unnoticed in the wind stream, but nothing got wet or damaged.

I missed the Seahawks game, which was unfortunate, since it was a rare win. When I finally turned the TV on, the choices were San Francisco versus somebody or the Vikings and the Bears. Although it would have made more sense to watch SF since they're in our conference I pretty much have to tune in to Favre TV when Mandy is around.

I've been pretty well hard-wired to root against the Vikings from all the years Mandy was a fan of Brett in Green Bay so I almost reflexively find myself cheering when their opponents do well and groaning when Favre connects... which happened a lot today. He's having a monster season, and it sort of forces you to re-assess his career. Everyone knows the interceptions thing, but with an extremely solid front line (anchored by former Seahawk Steve Hutchinson, whose absence from the 'Hawks does much to explain their own lackluster performance these past few years), an extraordinarily capable receiving corps, and All-Pro running back Adrian Peterson in the backfield, he's got all cylinders firing and is at a career low in the season for interceptions, and near highs for everything else. It makes you wonder what he could have done with more talent around him earlier in his career, and to what extent it was his talent alone that dragged Green Bay along for all those years. Or perhaps he simply didn't have the maturity until this point in his career to make use of everything that was at his disposal. It's hard to say but interesting to consider.

The afternoon was diminished by news of the four Lakewood police officers who were gunned down at a coffee shop preparing for their shifts. It's especially chilling coming so close on the heels of the assassination of Seattle officer Tim Brenton last month. In fact, it almost makes you angry at them... what could they have been thinking? It's too early for any details of what happened exactly, but how, a bare month after a cold-blooded killing of another officer who was just sitting there, could they put themselves in that position? Were they in a booth? Was no one watching the door and did the killer not raise any hackles? It's not impossible for one armed man to kill four in a close-in gun battle, but you have to imagine it involves either incredible luck or the cooperation of the victims. And how could they have been unaware, bottled up, or otherwise unready in any way in the wake of Brenton's murder? Did they avoid firing back to avoid endangering others in the shop? If so, should they have, according to the cold logic of the active shooter response protocols adopted by many departments after the fiasco at Columbine?

Cops almost always are reacting rather than acting in these situations, as it must be; they are the good guys, they can't start pulling their guns every time they get a hinky feeling about someone. The crazies who do this sort of thing can conceal their intent and almost always get the first shot. Nonetheless, officers tend to prevail in these situations (to put it coldly, they have a 6 to 1 kill/death ratio versus criminals). Superior training and discipline has them making better use of cover, shooting straighter, and thinking more clearly than the opposition. American cops, by and large, are pretty ninja. Policing an armed and violent society has inherent risks that has upped the overall skill level of men and women in that dangerous job. Which is why it is so unbelievable that a single nut, in one fight, managed to kill four of them and escape. I can't off-hand think of anything like it; four officers have been killed by the same assailants twice in California in recent history, but in neither case were all the fatalities caused in the same incident... multiple encounters allowed the murderers to focus their efforts.

At any rate, as with any news of that sort, the whole thing made the rest of the already grey day seem particularly grim and unsettled. Mandy had to go back to town today to teach tomorrow, and I am, as always, irrationally worried about her being there alone after such a vivid demonstration of how unbalanced some parts of our society are. I know, of course, that in fact violence is increasingly rare, particularly involving strangers; still, as I write above how saddened I am that the four deceased were caught off-guard, it seems obvious that no matter how rare, it is a thing that it would be both hypocritical and folly not to prepare for. I guess if you want to find the connection to nautical matters in this post, that would be it: risk is the intersection of the severity of a possibility with the likelihood of it occurring. If a thing is both rare and inconsequential, then putting much effort into preparing for it is probably a waste. If it is uncommon, but serious, however, it's probably worth preparing for in some respect. I guess I would put "getting assaulted by a complete stranger" in that category, just like "hitting a rock and sinking your boat." Someone probably keeps odds on both those... be interesting to see how similar/dissimilar they are.

I see now they are looking for a guy pardoned by Mike Huckabee when he was governor of Arkansas in connection with the shootings. If it turns out that is in fact the killer, I imagine this will put paid to any further presidential aspirations Huckabee may have had.

Bering Sea crab boats

After digesting a day's worth of "Deadliest Catch" episodes, I am even more impressed with the crab boat captains and crews that work the Bering Sea waters. It's not so much the bravery (whether it is bravery, avarice, or stupidity actually seems to be a point much debated, and I'm not sure I have a position on the matter) that pushes them to work in those waters, but the subtle expertise they demonstrate in the difficult situations in which they find themselves. They may come off in many episodes as regular, working-class joes doing a tough job of an industrial variety, but in fact they are generally a bunch of savvy, intelligent, supremely capable individuals who happen to be doing traditionally blue collar work. It's a bit like astronauts out building new modules onto the International Space Station; they're turning wrenches, sure, but that doesn't imply they are simple grease monkeys.

As one of the captain's observed in an episode I saw today, "These guys up here are all the real deal." You don't stay employed, or alive, in that environment if you can't think as well as act.

Nothing reinforces this more for me than some other reality programs that have come out over the past couple of years in the hopes of duplicating the success "Dangerous Catch" has found. Discovery has one called "Lobstermen" that basically is the same show only covering fishing boats working the North Atlantic, and someone else had one about loggers working here in the Pacific Northwest.

Watching those just reaffirmed all the low opinions that us elitist snobs often have about folks in those professions; they tend to be the dregs, who can't get work doing much else, certainly not for any more money. They posture and then whine, make dumb mistakes and then walk off, and seem utterly incapable of addressing obstacles with the least bit of ingenuity or cleverness. I have trouble sitting through those shows. The drama is usually in the challenges that the crews face, but the challenges presented in those imitation shows either seem contrived or pathetic... obstacles that wouldn't slow, say, the Hillstrand boys down for more than five minutes, instead absorbing an entire episode as a gaggle of loggers stand around flummoxed.

In contrast, watching the crab boat crews reveals a bunch of guys who can navigate, weld, fix hydraulic systems, perform medical diagnosis and field surgery, rescue men overboard in twenty foot seas, SCUBA dive in icy waters, splice cable, clamber ashore from a wrecked boat using an improvised ladder of crab pots and safety rope of shot line, and perform a whole host of other mechanical and intellectual tasks that would strain the capabilities of professionals from any number of fields... in short, they exhibit the modern equivalence to the traditional abilities to "hand, reef, and steer" required of the able seaman in the age of sail.

I guess that's something that appeals to me about boating in general, though, the idea that if you keep putting yourself in that environment, you can pick up many of those diverse and useful skills. Of course, every summer here we see plenty of evidence that isn't universally the case, but at least the potential is there. And I'm constantly amazed, even here in the tame waters of Puget Sound, how many truly excellent skippers there are out there. They may be your dentist, a mechanic at Boeing, your local postal worker, or a software engineer in "real" life... but on the water, they have all the skills and poise of those iron men of yore sailing wooden ships. Watching from shore, few lubbers have any idea the depth of knowledge and expertise that can be involved in making those fluffy white things scud about on the placid waters, but the more I learn, the more impressed I am with the local sailing community. It's not the Bering Sea, but it's challenging enough!

Deadliest Catch Marathon

On Discovery Channel, all day today. Booyah! Thanksgiving Weekend marathon-watching at it's finest. Tomorrow is "Dirty Jobs" and I expect to remain fully occupied by that as well.

Happy Thanksgiving!

What we are lacking in two-legged friends and family this year we are making up for with the feathered and four-legged variety. I guess we miss the rest of you and all, but frankly it's a relief that none of the menagerie up here will be asking us at any point through the weekend "So, what is it that you are most thankful about this year?"

We're actually heading into town to have Thanksgiving Dinner at a vegeterian restaurant with some other friends who are absent family this year, but if not, I believe we would have opened the house up, brought the chickens in (it's raining wicked hard out there right now) and had a Thanksgiving Feast with them, the pugs, and the cat. No bets on who would have attempted to feast on whom.

Hope everyone is having a grand holiday this year!

Crock-pot cooking

I've never used a crock-pot before, but I was listening to NPR last week and they had a panel of people on talking about favorite fall recipes, and apple-butter cropped up. They spent about five minutes enthusing about slow-cooked apple butter and debating their favorite recipes, and I was sold. I have always liked apple butter, but I've never had both apples and the means of producing butter from them at the same time. Up here in Hadlock, however, there is a crock-pot sitting on the pantry shelf and four or five trees full of apples going to waste up the hill, and I didn't have anything else planned for the weekend beyond sitting on my duff watching football, so I decided to make my own.

First, and the hardest part of the whole endeavor, I had to convince Mandy to go pick me the apples and then help me peel and slice them. After a lot of moaning and complaining this was accomplished, and we found a combination corer/slicer that made the work a lot easier. The apples were mostly pretty small, which meant we had to cut up a lot more of them for five quarts than if we'd been using off-the-shelf apples from the grocery store.

That done, the rest was pretty easy: pitch 'em into the crock pot with a mess of sugar, cinammon, and cloves, and let the whole thing bubble away on low overnight. The recipes I came across were fairly consistent in recommending eight to eleven hours of cooking time, but either my apples were too crispy or I didn't chop them up finely enough, because I had them on for almost thirteen before the consistency was good. The taste, if I do say so myself, is excellent... better than the off-the-shelf variety by far, although mine still isn't as smooth (I could have blended the mush and cooked it down a little more for better consistency, but it doesn't matter that much to me). We ended up with a lot less than I expected, though... five quarts of apples doesn't yield the veritable flood of apple butter that I had imagined. So, we'll probably have to whip up another batch here before all the apples go bad. I should ask Mandy how many are left up there....

Television: not all I had imagined it to be

I was pretty excited about this weekend, my first in quite some time with a working television and satellite access that I would have all to myself. I've been craving football, and other than a few glimpses in sports bars and the kind indulgence of friends, I haven't had a chance to catch a complete, non-streaming game all year. Streaming has been all right, but it's just not the same as the glory of a full-size set, a full-on stereo, and the stability of a dedicated satellite TV connection.

Although we've been house-sitting for a couple of weeks now, circumstances have previously dictated that I be back in town on weekends since we have been here, so it's just as if I hadn't been here at all. I'm looking at the same situation for the foreseeable future, so I had a lot riding on games happening this weekend, at least mentally.

Unfortunately, it was a bye week for the Huskies, and the dragging Seahawks were up against the newly reinvigorated, Favre-led Vikings. Of course, my worst fears were realized; the Vikings gave the Hawks a merciless beatdown, one that wasn't even particularly exciting to watch. So the whole TV thing, at least whatever I had built it up to be in my mind, has been kind of a dud.

Don was wondering why I seem to be so uncharacteristically absorbed with football lately, and I didn't have a ready answer. I think I finally figured it out, and maybe figured out why it is that a lot of people are so absorbed by sports in general. Football intrigues me because of the intellectual aspects; once you get past the hitting, it's actually a pretty complex game, and when executed properly, it's a sort of elegantly violent ballet, a beautiful exercise of physical prowess and mental agility. But that's not really why I've been so interested lately. Rather, it's because it represents an escape. Because it's something you can be absorbed in, can lose yourself in the permutations of and the technicalities. It takes you away from some of the frankly unappealing elements of day to day living, elements that have been more prominent in life lately than I might otherwise prefer.

So I'm watching the game today and a Chevy commercial comes on, one of those melancholy John Cougar Mellencamp versions showing the stolid, suffering but persevering blue-collar culture that represents the company's target market, and I realize that a lot of people are, and always have been, in that same boat. I'm probably just projecting, but if I was an assembly-line worker recently laid-off, or a farmer whose fields had turned to dust, I'd probably be pretty eager to lose myself every Sunday in the travails of the team of my choice, too. So maybe that's why I am so eager to do so now, and so displeased that the teams of my choice either aren't on, or aren't performing well enough to allow me to participate in a vicarious victory right now, when I could badly use one.

The Salish What?

You may or may not be familiar with the controversy (which may or may not be much of a controversy, when you get to the bottom of it) over the now official naming of the body of water encompassing the Strait of Georgia, Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound as the Salish Sea. The idea, brainchild of retired WWU marine biologist Bert Webber, has been kicking around for thirty years but saw a burst of interest within the past five years or so, leading to its official adoption by the State of Washington and US Boards on Geographic Names.

I was suspicious at first and have resisted applying the monicker in my own references. I dislike stuff that seems to just be made up for the sake of political correctness or some mythical sense of ecological purity, and this smacked of that on the surface... an ahistorical Indian name applied for the purpose of tying together a geographic region as an ecosystem. "Salish Sea, the meaning would be so positive in the sense of all of us working together," said one supporter of the bid. Bah! Positivity, what did that ever get me? I don't want a body of water to be touchy-feely, I just want it to flood and ebb twice a day with moderate predictability.

The reasons opponents have given for their stand against it have been no better, though. "It's just another one of the American efforts to erase the border," says one, an example of "cultural imperialism" stressing words over deeds, though this argument fails to explains exactly how all the things that make a border a border (ie, different taxes, laws, and a bunch of guys in uniform standing along it) are going to be erased by the new name, or how Canadian citizen Webber, the originator of the monicker, fits in to these nefarious plans. Frankly, I got tired of listening to people whining back and forth on the subject these past few years and have just as soon be rid of the whole subject.

But despite all this I kind of like the name itself; it's catchy. And whatever the motives of the people proposing it, I find that it actually does fill something of an important niche in geographic reference to the region. I have in the past found myself casting about for a name for the region roughly covered by the Salish Sea, cobbling together "lower Inside Passage" as a bastardized approximation. It turns out there is a logic to the layout of the sea; there are natural borders at the edges of it, and only notional ones inside it. It comprises the general area of the puddle where we primarily sail, a place that has never really been confined by national boundaries, and now those waters are tied together with a single name instead of a bunch of hyphenated approximations. "It's a silly idea. We have beautiful names," says the same Canadian resister of cultural imperialism as was quoted above. Maybe (although, frankly, I don't think "Strait of Georgia" is anything to write home about), but what you don't have is one name to refer to all of those places together... until now.

Better Late

So, I may have mentioned to some of you in the distant past that I was talking with a local nautical website about writing a blog for them. Finally, this has come to fruition, and you can find my humble efforts on their site at http://threesheetsnw.com/lateentry/

Of course, this comes about just as the cruising season is fading away, so you might not see the post volume spike there until closer to spring. I'll continue to maintain this blog, too, as a channel for topics of more direct interest to friends and family, but my most pithy observations and generalized nautical subjects will probably end up posted there rather than here. On the plus side, they'll be more likely to be spell-checked first.