Other states, other lives, other souls

In September this year I flew to Seattle and then drove a rental car to the Olympic Peninsula to join up with my husband Phil and his team of four other long distance backpackers. My mission was to pick up a last cache of food dropped by Phil at my old friend’s house in Sequim, add fresh sandwiches for a treat, and drive through the darkness to the Lost Resort cabin on Lake Ozette. In the morning of the next day I would either carry it in some 3 miles to meet them as they hiked along the longest roadless stretch of Pacific beach in the country or wait for them to walk in to me.

The iffy part was how the repair of my broken elbow three weeks earlier would be going.  In the security line at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport I raised my hand when the TSA officer asked “does anyone have any metal in their body?”  I was sent to the X-ray machine.  Following the X-ray, I was subjected to a very thorough body scan.  Why, I wondered, since the stainless steel plate in my right elbow should have been very visible. It was not my new bionic body part at all. It was the shirt with the sparkly beads and sequins, along with the metal filaments in my sweater that caused the extra level of suspicion. Then the secreted too large tube of organic toothpaste in my carry-on was found and disposed of. I was lucky I got on the plane at all.

The visit with my old friend from our Palo Alto days in Sequim was the first of five visits with old friends along the way driving back to Minneapolis from Northwest Washington. Each person, except my daughter living in Helena, MT, was a friend from college days, so when I say old friends, I mean 45-50 years ago.   I was struck by all that we still had in common (e.g., hating our current President), and yet how different our ways of living were, in different regions of the country.

Liz, my Sequim friend, and I were part of a group of activists dedicated to getting more child care centers for working women in the 70s, dubbed “Child Care Now”.  Liz was a low income single mom who was trying to get herself an education and career after a divorce.  She and I were the non-radical wing of the group, preferring to hold a “diaper-in” in the mayor’s office to publicize the need for public subsidies for child care programs, rather than take over a building, as our more revolutionary comrades were suggesting. Our tactics were successful and the city council in Palo Alto ended up giving us the use of a decommissioned kindergarten building and $200,000 from Nixon’s new revenue sharing program. The child care center we started with exactly no funds, except the donated space, is still there today: Sojourner Truth Child Development Center

Liz was always artistic and forthright, an east coast gal, and a fantastic gardener.  Who was Liz now, 40 years later?  She was still artistic and very forthright. Wracked by arthritis now, at age 71, she and her husband were packing to move back to Durango, CO, to a very dry climate, instead of a very wet one, in hopes of some relief. Besides the beautiful fused glass jewelry she sold at a local art gallery in Sequim, her fondest memories of Sequim would be the community garden she started more than a decade ago when they first moved there. Soon they would trade their large picture window that looked out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca for one that looked out over the dry Colorado mountains. We hugged good-bye and promised to meet up again in Durango.

Next we took a ferry from the Peninsula to the mainland and drove the rest of the way north to Bellingham, WA, where an old friend from my husband’s Macalester dropout days had settled.  He and another friend, Stoney, were salmon fishermen back in the day. They fished off Lummi Island in the San Juans, employing a technique called reef netting. This sustainable fishing method continues today.

Rich is a recently-retired vocational counselor, with close ties to local Native tribes by a previous marriage and employment. Now days he’s remarried to a Scottish-American with a Scottish terrier and many more Scottish and Gaelic items of national pride. Rich has also become a volunteer social worker, handling the finances of a colleague whose mind no longer allowed him to remember most things in the present.

Still the boatman, Rich invited us to join him on the in his new outfitted Ranger Tug. “Let’s go crabbing tomorrow”, he said, when we got there for dinner. The next morning we had headed to the dock at Bellingham Bay with two three-foot wide circular crab pots, a cooler and a couple of turkey legs. There were white caps in the bay, but no waves over three feet.  Wind, yes, but nothing frightening.  Off we went, with Rich artfully skirting the largest swells. About an hour and a half later we reached his favorite crabbing spot near Eliza Island. Rich left the wheel to go to the back to prepare the crab pots. We watched as he struggled to keep upright as the boat tossed and turned. After dropping both pots to the bottom of the bay, he motored to a quieter spot to wait for our prey to find the bait.  Rich watched the waves farther out from the cove and saw that they were quieting as time passed. Back we went to find the Styrofoam bobbers with his name on them.  Phil was charged with hooking the rope tied to the pot near the bobber and bringing the pots up to the surface.  Crabs!  Lots of them! We measured their width across the carapace. The smaller ones and female ones were thrown back. We were left with eight lovely creatures thrown into the cooler.  The ride back was much calmer.

Rich immediately boiled the Dungeness crabs with aromatics in a large propane-powered pot in the garage. We were eating them three hours later.  When we left the next morning, they presented us with nearly a pound of the remaining shelled crab.  We ate it in a large salad at our campsite that night and shared what we couldn’t eat with the campers nearest us.

On we drove to Missoula, Montana.  Each of us had an old friend there. Phil’s Macalester dropout friend Tom had returned to university, gotten a law degree, and become an executive with the Montana branch of the National Wildlife Federation. Unlike all the Midwestern urbanites we know, Tom is an avid hunter and an avid environmentalist (not at all unusual in Montana). When we arrived, Tom had just returned from hunting with a clutch of sharp tailed grouse.  His wife, Meg, also a NWF executive from Texas, stayed home to tend her nine llamas and work on her Texas job from her Montana home office.  For dinner our last night, we ate sharp-tailed grouse breasts with a roasted tomato and leek soup that we like to make in the early fall.  The grouse breasts were delicious, like duck breast, but even more flavorful.  They sent us on our way with a dozen pears from their trees.

During our stay with the NWF friends, I slipped in a briefer visit with another old Child Care Now friend. Nancy, an east coast red diaper baby, had adapted to a western small university town effortlessly. After starting an alternative school in Ukiah, California in the 70s, she had followed her S.O. to Missoula, where he was to become a wolf expert.  Her son, now grown, has become a bear expert. A lot of outdoor work with scary animals. Her lovely little home, up a bit in the Rattlesnake Creek foothills above downtown Missoula, was an oasis of vegetables, fruits, flowers and beehives. I noticed on this visit that there was a new electrified fence, in addition to the obligatory deer fence.  I learned it was to keep the bears away from the honey, and anything else they might enjoy ravaging. Her newish husband Chic showed me his homemade fruit and tomato drying operation and his composting system using goat poo  manure from a local goat farmer.  Nancy has built a life as a therapist, university teacher for future Peace Corps volunteers, musician, hiker and skier.  Now with grandchildren, she is applying her considerable talent as a knitter/crocheter to little sweaters and the like. 47 years ago she crocheted me a hippie bra, which I wore for decades.

In only two hours we arrived in Helena, Montana, the Capitol, although it’s population is only about 35,000.  Our daughter, raised in public schools in Minneapolis, Peace Corps graduate, M.A. from an international school in the Hague, now farms an urban homestead, with chickens, rabbits, perennial food stuffs, and herbs for remedies with her preschool daughter who knows her way around large animals, chicken and rabbit coops and eats anything out of the garden that mom says is OK to eat. When we arrived, there was rabbit stewing in the crock pot, fresh eggs on the kitchen counter and shelves of traditional apothecary products she has formulated.  A neighbor had dropped off a half venison haunch and two freshly caught trout in trade for a couple of rabbits.

Now we are back in our liberal urban environment, buying our food at the coop, except for our annual vegetable garden, walking and biking our well-trod pathways, worrying about chipmunks, squirrels and rabbits chomping our produce, and not knowing anyone of our local friends and acquaintances who hunt.