Reporting from Lummi

"Bucolic" (of or relating to the pleasant aspects of the countryside and country life) might be a good word to start with. There’s not much going on. Start a fire in the morning. Drink a cup of tea. Do some news and read some blogs on a dial-up connection. The island pace is as slow as the dial-up. In the afternoon our grandson might come. He’s pretty much an outdoor unit and wants to move pebbles from one location to another or put wood chips in the wood cart or, most important, spit apple skins. The apples are long gone so we hide one in a tree like an Easter egg and pretend to pick it, then sit on a bench near the bank and watch Mt. Baker come and go while we spit. If we are in front of the house some neighbor might stop to talk. That is, they stop their car in the middle of the road and let the occasional car drive around. No one gets exercised over this. Road rage is unknown. The ferry goes back and forth. The cars queue up. Once a week we run errands. Groceries mostly, but try to schedule a stop at The Old Town Cafe for biscuits and tahini gravy. On the reservation across the way the Tribal Police chased a young man into the Nisqually River and he drowned. A sad event but one has to be glad it was the Tribal cops and not the Whatcom County Sheriff doing the chasing. Back in the ferry line, a Lummi man will try to sell fish, another art, another carvings. Business is slow. No tourists in the line up. Bucolic again, we do some pruning, some weeding and some carving. I bought some curved carving blades from a forge on Waldron Island. Waldron, if you don’t know, doesn’t encourage visitors but you can visit the North Bay Forge via the internet. The tools are great and I have learned how not to cut myself. Carving is an interesting meditation. One disappears into the wood. A neighbor invited me to his carving studio to see what he was doing. He gave me half a round of green alder to use to make a mask. I don’t have an adze yet (a good carver’s adze costs about $190) so will work it down with a chain saw so I can start. There’s a face of some kind living in the wood and I intend to find it, one chip of wood at a time. The eagles are back from the mountain tops cruising the beach for snacks. The kingfishers and blue herons stay year around. After dark the owls are hooting. It’s been raining but on a sunny day we rode our bikes around the north end of Lummi. The reef net boats are put away for the season and Legoe Bay appears deserted. The local public TV station will be broadcasting a documentary someone made on this ancient fishing method. We don’t get the local PBS station and won’t get to see it. We get three Canadian stations via antenna and watch Canadian news. One can start to feel Canadian up here near the border. I’m reading O Canada an obscure book of literary criticism by the great Edmund Wilson. He is explaining Canada to me. I need to understand. I can see Canada from where I sit. On clear nights we see the lighted ski slopes above Vancouver. Tonight we’ll have dinner with friends at the island’s Beach Cafe. It’s a gathering of neighbors. If someone brings a baby in, he or she gets passed around. Most nights we have been watching Firefly, a very entertaining sci-fi series which appeared on Fox in 2002 and was canceled before the season ended. Having some idea of how difficult it is to get a show into production on onto network television it must have been very distressing for the creators and actors to do something of this quality and have it fail. But, it really hasn’t failed. It’s a huge DVD success. So much so that it spawned as film this year called Serenity which may give birth to a sequel. Highly recommended to jazz up a bucolic life. The big leaf maple has shed its leaves and most of its trillion seeds. I have scooped them by the bucket full out of the gutters. The grass has mostly stopped growing. The fog is lifting and I need to go out and hide an apple in a tree.