Beyond Tahuya

Were I alive a hundred years ago, I coulda gotten there quicker. Hop on a canoe and zip across the elbow of Hood Canal, instead of driving forever to the finger tip and doubling back on North Shore Road. Hell, in a canoe I wouldn't have had to do it at extra low tide, couldn't have even had to walk, gliding over the delta with a waterbird's-eye view.

But now is when I live in this body on this earth, so the bus took me to work, where the motor pool chief gave me his finest SUV.  NPR and nectarines for the mind and body, a jug o java for the soul, and the drive didn't seem so bad. Other than where a lane had slid into the water and traffic had to take turns, nothing stood athwart the path, and before too long I found myself at the mouth of Rendsland Creek.

I made it to the edge of the exposed delta right at slack water, looping around before the flood flowed. Bars of oyster, streams of mussels, and me. The wavy sound of traffic across the water, but nobody moving on the Kitsap side, no boats even. A few cracked rocks whispered of crackling fires long ago, but none in herd formation on a distinct archaeological site, and I had no luck finding artifacts. Then again, I was on big shellfish beds a short paddle from the mouth of the Skokomish River, and if that doesn't mean anything to you, it's closer still to Potlatch Park. Once again, I'd run up against the paradox and idiocy of archaeology: no artifacts, no site.

Fortunately, my card says Cultural Resource Specialist, and big shellfish beds with a good freshwater stream are sure as hell of interest to people with culture.

As I alluded to earlier, I do live now, and here in Washington that means that walking the tide flats is only possible in certain places. So when I got close to a couple of pilings I saw that they marked the edge of a commercial shellfish area. And that means that the same card that had freed me from my archaeocratic trap a hundred paces back just as surely put up a fence here, because it just won't do for a gummint man to be trespassing. So my body stood there dumbly subdued while my mind took a brief vacation to Hawaii, where the waters and shores are free to all. Malama pono.

So then it became a game of zigging and looping, zagging and meandering, trying not to stomp the shells that looked inhabited, dogging every high spot and weird rock and channel cut and...you et the picture. Still no artifacts. A couple of stubby pilings that may or may not be 50 years old, but no artifacts.

No artifacts, that is, until I found the Giant Stone Money From Yap. Evidence of trans-Pacific trade, probably with Tahitians as the middle men, if my hunch was right. Not that I'm saying it is necessarily ancient. Nah, probably in the early days of the sandalwood and fur trade. I mean, if you're the chief who gives away Giant Stone Money From Yap a your potlatch, you're on top, nobody can ante up to that.

Post Equinox Garden

Fall keeps gusting in and out, but even the persistence of clear weather cannot defeat the earth's tilt. With the shrinking of the daylight, most of the plants call it quits, at least as far as producing anything new. Leaves gray with mildew, roots routing a last bit of energy to seeds along stems stepped on, chewed at, tunneled through ad generally abused by the growing season.

Why then does the tropical vine keep going?

Lycopersicon pimpenellifolium, the 'wild tomato' that I would snack on from Kealakekua to Nualolo, a rampant vine I've also seen described as the 'wild Everglades tomato.' Jungly cloak of tropical shores and clearings, 30-foot tentacles flowing over lava and helping ancient sites return to obscurity. Why so fat and happy north of 45 degrees, in the legendarily cool and wet Northwest?

Mixed Messages

Odd what could be witnessed on Moku o Keawe a few years ago. Some things must remain un-pictured. Some things exist only in the imperfectly audited banks of memory. Other things are captured forever at the twitch of a thumb through a rental car windshield, and may last ad nauseum.

For instance this, in the parking lot of the Kailua-Kona Wal-Mart (lo, the corrupting influence of the creeping hyphen of cosmopolity). Pit-marks bespeaking plentiful mileage, perhaps the catalyst for the advertising? As with the tourist economy overall, I have to wonder, how long can this career last? Wrinkles and sores, erosion and dead reefs, the aging takes its toll.

And this, way on up the coast where the richers resort, where carousing escapists give coralline voice to vacation romances and other inanities, punctuated here and there by the rare real message, someone put this. Bold peace sign, leavened with troop support, disambiguized by the bring em home finisher. All of which spells, "I could come to a $400/night resort on the same technology bringing shock and awe to sitting duck A-rabs, and then when I scored some $30/gram "Kona Gold" (45% oregano and bubble gum) I was inspired to strike out in my rental Hummer and speak out for Peace!"

Hoomau Nualolo!

I found some old photos of Nualolo Kai, a place to which I am bound and will return forevermore.

This was an offering when we returned a long lost Nualolo child to her home. Shell lei, Lu hee, coral head, and a packet of I only know what.

And here are some of the guys who built the new old wall for Kaunapueo. They worked time and time again to make it right. They embodied hoomau, gave it life force fro the rising of the sun til way past midnight, laboring under the 600-foot X. Mahalo Keiki o Kauai and Keiki.

Lake Union 1936

In keeping with the orthophoto mosaic theme, here is Seattle and Lake Union, from 1936. (Yes children, they had cameras back then, and airplanes for that matter, but the cameras had rolls of plasticky stuff inside that had to go to a lab before you could see anything.)

Again, water is used for the the trickiest intersections between individual frames, and so Lake Union is a patchwork, but not as bad as the Hood Canal one from the last post; is it just that black and white is more soothing? Of course, it does make the bridge over the Ship Canal a tricky crossing.

Various churches through history have identified funner ways to go blind, but that wouldn't work in the office, and being a geek I enjoy ferreting out old photos and squinting and peering to find old shorelines and historic hot-spots. Lake Union is one of the places I keep looking at, and have been meeting with a group of Seattle people interested in the submerged history there. Right now we have sonar scans (lots of squinting and speculation looking at those images, believe me), and are ready for divers. Anyone out there scuba certified and good at staying just above toxic silt?

Cubist Riptide

The sea was angry that day? It was a dark and stormy night?

Nah. Save your cliches for meatspace.

It was a day when I thanked the conspiracy of a not-too-distant star and weak earthly winds for the light sneaking into my cubicle sideways. In a month, maybe a week if the rains kick in, that won't be happening, and I'll be cloaked in flourescents. But today I cruised over mountains and wetlands from the comfort of the office. Not that I appreciated it. No, I lapsed now and then into dark territory, practicing for November: back pain, office air, the dread of some crisis-triggered phone call.

Then, swooping over the big bend in Hood Canal, I had real reason to be happy I was not out in the real world, sandwiched between dueling blues of sky and sea. Perched just off the marina was the biggest baddest cubist rip-tide I've witnessed all year. A mosaic of vastly different conditions, the kind of thing the GIS overlords frown on, and the likes of which never seem to happen on land. Whole ships could've been lost in this most un-Bermudan quadrangle, or worse yet, cut in half and left to improvise.

NRB

The Natural Resource Building in Olympia was built recently enough that the landscaping is rife with native species, many with edible fruits. Pretty good set on the berries this year (more salal than anything, but no complaints here), and it looks like there could be a decent amount of huckleberries (evergreen) once the frost makes 'em, tasty.

There's some kind of small tree that pumped out blueberry-ish fruit earlier in the summer. Not quite as tasty as regular blueberries, but good for fistfuls of sustenance as I walked to work. And of course the Himalayan blackberry is invading the plantings with its alien deliciousness. Although the NRB contains numerous experts on resource management, restoration ecology, and native plants, they're not the ones maintaining the landscape, and inevitably it has degraded from a native species perspective.

Still, not bad for a place where the 'pristine' native flora was wiped out more than a century ago, and I really appreciate that there are edible species to be had in the concrete jungle.

And I think I may be the only one, other than that hippie girl I saw gorging on salal berries last summer. She looked guilty for a second when she saw that I saw, then broke into a bluetoothed (finally, the word used as it should be) smile when she figured out that I was not The Man. Otherwise, I seem to be the only one feasting on the landscape bounty, and I make only the smallest dent. Most of the berries drop to the ground or even dry up on the plant.

Why? Maybe because people think berries from the market are good, or even those picked in the woods, but not if they come from a city. But I've watched for long enough to know there's no spray, and the plants are safe. Could be that food in unexpected places is invisible. Or maybe my shamelessness outpaces that of the other bipeds roaming around, who wouldn't want to be seen stooping and picking, risking the scorn of the smokers perched 25.1 feet from every door. Especially for salal or plain old blackberries. Only a newcomer would get excited about that.

Borderline

Last week featured the third trip to Eastern Washington in as many weeks. Daylight driving this time, big SUV instead of a Prius, thermous o coffee and Butch Helemano bouncing me up the Cascades in no time. Then on the other side marking my territory at various rest stops; I especially remember one just before descending into the Gorge: golden late sun, departing a stop with New Roman Times track 2 blaring, blazing down the on-ramp like a runway, lifting off and swooping down under the rays with the last of the java still warming my gullet, intent on slaying the miles between me and rest.

Such are the warrior dreams of the bored archaeocrat. Escape from the sunless cubicle farm, hours without phones and emails imposing, miles without stoplights--all of these things soothe the soul. But running away cannot be the only trick; the warrior who only retreats is no hero at all, just another big-whig Democratic strategist. Dancing on the site of a certain inter-agency tiff from which I'd emerged OK was no satisfaction, although I loitered on the ashes for a while and may have peed in the general vicinity. The meeting I went for was no place to play warrior, and I managed to shift into diplomatic mode for long enough to get through it.

The next day involved a run through reservations up toward the Canadian border. At one point we were looking across a valley at that vast socialist empire. I tell myself that but for the fact I was in a caravan of state workers, I'd've pulled off, hiked over, and played Illegal Alien for a while: undercut their working class by doing their shit jobs for an unlivable wage, stick it to their elite by doing the landscaping poorly, impoverish them Canucks by getting free health care, stuff like that.

Truth was, though, that even without the paranoia that some hidden border camera would catch me, my earlier run-in with good old American police had put a damper on things. I'd been cruising along this country road at speeds just short of flipping an SUV. Didn't see Johnny Law lurking, busy as I was snapping photos through bug-splattered windows of whatever seemed interesting: cool hills, picturesque barns, grazing camels. So suddenly there's a black muscle car with dark tinted windows on my tail, and after playing cat and mouse for a minute, he flashes hidden cop-lights and pulls me over. Being caffeine-deprived, I didn't get all nervous. Being white, I didn't get hassled or searched. The officer was very nice and maybe under-estimated my speed to a notch below Reckless Endagnerment, but I was in no mood to further test the good will of law enforcement, especially with the Mounties and their legendary, Bush-league lust for torture. Or for that matter, I had no intention of getting picked up by bureaucrats who would grant me asylum and room and board, robbing me of outlaw status and the chance to embarrass the regime.

And anyway, I could count coup already. I'd been reckless without getting cited for it; I'd been pulled over without the fuzz realizing I was a Coyote, smuggling half a dozen Gringos to their Canadian dreams. Not long after I saw Johnny Law peel off in another direction, I made my way the curve in the tracks where my charges could hop a train on the Overground Railroad toward the promised land.

Land of Wind and Wheat (and Water?)

(Photo: Sunset with Rainier and Power Lines)


Once upon a time, an agency had an adamant opinion about a historic place they had never seen, and were not interested in visiting. And so, on the Monday following a vacation in which I drove the family 800 miles around eastern Washington, I met with the agency experts ensconced in their Olympian fastness, and then got in a car to drive to the eastern end of the state. Blame my stubborn empiricism.


(Photo: Rolling Wheat Land Near Spokane)

People from the verdant, cosmopolitan Puget Basin tend to regard the land east of the Cascades with freely expressed condescension and fairly repressed apprehension. Dry open spaces where black turtlenecks and soul patches not only look foolish, but may get your ass kicked. Diners where quinoa would be sacrilege if people knew what it was (this is wheat country, dammit) and roads where a Prius is the stunted runt apt to be kicked aside for the buzzards.





(Photo: West Medical Lake, No Dam Required)



One of the false stereotypes concerns the climate. Sure, it can be hot and dry enough to reduce west-side hipsters to dusty husks, but the aridity is only in comparison to the moss-clothed Puget Basin. Instead of falling from the hundred kinds of clouds we have in the west, the water wells up under blue skies in pothole lakes and springs, it flows from the mountains and abounds in the impounds, along the Columbia and other dammed rivers of the region.





The dams are a dilemma. They disrupted natural systems, but also form massive settling basins, which is why the amount of toxic sediments entering the lower Columbia from the Washigton side is far lower than from the less damned Oregon rivers. They just about killed the native population, cutting off the annual upstream flows of fish, but they irrigate crops. [The dam pictured is the Chief Joseph; is naming the dam for him and finally--after years of lawsuits--coughing up some of the revenue to the tribes fair compensation for rendering salmon homeless and tribes hungry?] They drowned some settlements, but power millions of homes without burning an ounce of fossil fuel. So ambiguity may be the cost of my aging and society's 'progress.' When I read The Monkey Wrench Gang years ago, it seemed obviously righteous to go blow up some damns, but am I willing to unleash a flood of toxic mud and kill off agriculture and enable coal-firers?



(Photo: They Took My Land and Fish, and All I Got Was a Dam)




Now the talk is of wind, which eastern Washington has in even more abundance than water. Besides the generally wind-swept vastness, there are places where the Cascade passes funnel the flow, making ideal ground for wind farms. Instead of paying for water, fertilizer, and fuel to eke out a living, a farmer can kick back and collect rent from wind farmers while the land itself recovers (or maybe is grazed by cattle). Meanwhile, there's a cheap flow of electricity to the city; sounds as glorious and free as hydro-electric did when it arrived on the scene. But don't worry, the powers that be will find a way to wreak some havoc and cheat some Indians. (News that already this year two golden eagles have been killed by windmills jibes the near-future scenario in Sherman Alexie's story "Green World" in June's Harpers. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/06/0082529)



Between these musings, I did get to the work at hand, and found the historic resource to be less than met the remote eye. Will that affect the bureaucratic judgement? Maybe not. Walked a lake shore and found an old orchard, but no trace of more ancient habitation (which is not to say that it didn't happen, just that they didn't modify the land enough or create sufficient junk for me to see). Explored an abandoned dairy farm that was part of the state hospital established "for the feeble minded." Saw a fishing osprey, skulking coyote, and hordes of fowl. Smelled ammonia fertilizer, dust, and pond scum between blasts of fresh air. Drove until my clavicles ached.

Last Day on Cypress

Awakened on this final day by the sub-sonic slurp of a deeply ebbing tide, mud-sirens singing me shoreward and beyond. The captain headed out to pick up another intern, and I ambled down to map a dike laid down in the 1870s--positively ancient by Washington history standards--during the frenzy of Euro-men wresting ag land from the Skagit River and surrounding Sound.

Not much to show except a berm, so no plane table and alidade, just a notebook and a GPS. Biding my time and watching the tide pull further and further back. Taking photos general and detailed. Noting the alterations and silly attempts to foil the water's appetite for land. Concrete in one sea wall encompasses the archaeological history: shell midden, cut bone from a Europeanish table, and a can of WD-40.

Vast expanses of mud not exposed, I was free to strike out in search of sites and artifacts. 19th and 20th century detritus showed up here and there, and I also found a stone chopper that could have been made any time between 15,000 BP and the birth of the barnacle stuck to it.

Pilings rotted down to mud level showed the foundations of vacation cabins that had been depicted on land on the only map that ever depicted them, eliminating confusion that could only interest the geekiest reader. Seriously, is anyone still following this? Back away from the computer and do something worthwhile.

I've got some important daydreaming to do about the shoes I need to fabricate to help with mud-flat survey. I know I said they'd be like snowshoes, but now I'm thinking they ought to be modeled on heron feet: yew toes, woven webbing of otter hide strips, maybe even stilted to give me a higher perspective. Later, maybe. Right now the family is waking up and I ought to do something productive. You too. Adios.

Counter-Clockwise Again, But Not So Far, Followed By Much Hiking

Another cloudy morning dawns, and another counter-clockwise run embarking from Secret Harbor. First stop: Cypress Head. Great place to camp if you can get there. It’s connected to the main island by a TOMBOLO, the most ZAMBONI-esque of geographic terms. I paced all over looking for a site. Like middens, tombolos have plenty of shell, but it’s pretty much impossible to tell whether people had a role. Some shell and plenty of charcoal and ash on the uplands, but it’s a campsite, and nothing there to clue me into a truly old site. In good human habitat, and absent stable or growing soils, humans erase their sites.


Then on to Pelican Beach. This is where most people camp. More crowded, tents parked on the beach crest instead of dispersed in the trees. Why would anyone go here instead of Cypress Head? We rowed ashore to deliver biomass to the composting toilets (in a nature preserrve, don’t encourage people to toss in local leaves, and ignore the irony of importing bales of animal bedding).



Then the captain and I headed inland to cross the island on foot, bound for Smugglers Cove. The day before, passing the place on the water, it made no sense to me why a smuggler would choose a wide-open bight instead of the hidden fastness of Secret or Eagle Harbors. From land, though, you realize that the view from the shore is wide, and provides plenty of warning should someone be trying to sneak up on you (plus a bonus: line of sight to Eagle Cliff, where a lookout's view opens to 360). Revenuers headed toward you? Tuck into the woods and hide the goods, returning to shore to greet them empty-handed. Rare is the gummint worker that’s going to traipse through the woods and be able to track down the hooch. In Secret Harbor, by the time they rounded the bend, you were a sitting duck, which probably explains the moonshiners there resorting to the simple expedient of getting the agents drunk. Oral histories say the coast guard guys would drink for while and dump their fuel to make it seem they were on patrol. I seriously doubt that depression bootleggers would let fuel go anywhere but in their spare tanks.




The beach here has some serpentine outcrops glassy as obsidian, but there ain’t no flaking this stuff. And you probably shouldn’t try, because the same fibrous structure that thwarts knapping also demonstrates the asbestos-ness of this stone. Another threat to archaeological lungs.

So then back up over the island, but hanging a left at the top of the pass to reach Eagle Cliffs (Salish name supposedly means “Bloody Stump,” referring to the dead, red mossy balds in summer, resembling the decapitated neck of a duck). Incredible panorama from up there, especially in this nicely clarified afternoon. Eventually decided that something we were looking for would probably remain hidden, lead us on a wild (maybe headless) goose chase, drop us off a cliff, or commence an endless late-afternoon bush-whacking hike. So we opted for the shorter trek back to the trail and descent to Pelican. It felt like a long walk by then, but the whole thing couldn’t have been more than 3-4 miles with a max elevation gain of 600 feet, and the sight of retirees ascending as we neared shore put things back in perspective.

So, back down the hill and it was matter of a short row back to the boat. I’d pulled it off in the morning, and being born southern and raised Baptist [Holy Crap! MS Word auto-capitalized the denomination], macho guilt had kicked in sufficiently for me to volunteer on the afternoon row as well.



Thank Evolution that my life doesn't depend much on rowing, because that 30 meters or so was one of the most schadenfreudish shows of ineptitude I have ever performed. Disclaimer/Excuse: rowing across a swift current, two of us crammed in a 6-foot dingy so that oars constantly hit our knees, may not be the easiest pull. But I’m pretty sure it took me a half hour to get there. Gaining a little, losing a little, unable to catch enough of a rhythm to do more than break even, dislodging oarlocks. The final route, traced on a map, would be a giant question mark, the serif tip being a final desperate lunge, hand on the launch and toes hooked to the dingy.

Then the bliss of engine-powered swiftness back to Secret Harbor. No spaghetti sauce that night, so leftovers sustained us. I’d held back, and now produced the pack of cookies. I learned long ago that chewy cookies are a fine thing after a few days of fieldwork. Instead of Chewy Chips Ahoy (which taste plastic in town, but are fine for isolated shores), I’d upgraded to some northwest brand with a bold working class heroine on the package, and it turned out to be a good choice.

Then to bed, a bit sore, but feeling strong and happy, earning the rest more than I could in a few weeks of cubicle days.

Counter-clockwise on Cypress, and a Surprise Sojourn to Lummi

The next morning dawned foggy and cool, but as the sky inched toward brightness, the captain took off to pick up the honcho in Anacortes. I checked email; neither of us can fathom how an island with no phone line gets internet, and I failed to let the office know of my connectivity, because that kind of mundane BS would anger the gods who had delivered me to this island refuge. Nor did I spend undue time on personal email or follow facebook links, because the tide was falling, already below normal low, and such times are dear to aquatic archaeologists.

Among the assortment of field footwear, I’d brought some muck boots, waterproof and insulated. But being mortal and base, I cursed my busy life, which had prevented me from fabricating mud-shoes, which are like snow-shoes, but for walking on mud-flats. Indians had them, and even if they could be bought in stores, I would want a pair fashioned by my own hands. Steam-bent cedar rims and a complex web of otter hide that would leave a trail of beautiful prints to entertain the crows and baffle whatever clam-digger might pass before flowing tides swallowed the fleeting image.

But I digress. I walked the tidelands, discovering fire-cracked rock here, bottle frags there, an odd concentration of rocks…the things that make sub-sea-level archaeology so much fun. Oh, and deflated jellyfish of an enchanting hue. I wondered if they revivify when the tide comes in.

So the boat came in from Anacortes, and we three talked about the island, its sites, its characters, and the fairly vast remembrances of a honcho who worked his way up from the bottom over a generation. Especially in a place where ‘civilization’ ebbed long ago, it is the caretakers who know about a piece of land. Well, the poachers and pot-growers, too, but I don’t know them yet.

Then off we went, exiting Secret Harbor and hanging left until we reached the opposite side of the island. Honcho piloted, while we sat outside and watched the shore pass us by, jacketed against the cool and life-jacketed against the Bellingham Channel, then Rosario Strait.

Our destination, the eponymous island in Strawberry Bay, was where members of Vancouver’s expedition landed in May, 1792, and feasted on, you guessed it, strawberries. And onions. Both of which suggest a landscape considerably less forested than what we found on this day. Tribes used to burn land to maintain open forest and meadows (locally termed ‘prairies,’ although any self-respecting Midwesterner would balk at applying the term to tiny enclaves amidst vast forests). This fostered growth of root and berry foods, as well as allure sure to bring in the deer and other meaty treats. A funny thing: the nice canoe landing where we pulled in turns out to be an artifact of the Honcho, who years ago remedied the absence of one by bringing in a road crew to blast the offending boulders to smithereens, leaving the welcoming gravel beach we see today.

More suspicion and circumstantial evidence here than an actual site, and when I looked at what an archaeologist had thought might be a site close to 20 years ago, I saw less than met his eye. Still, a very cool island: bird-covered rock at the south, kelp beds on the fringes, lovely madrona trees (which prove that beauty is situational—the same pealing red epidermis revealing greenish mesodermis on a human would be hideous and infected burn), and glacially sculpted bedrock. I indulged in some crazy cliff exploration without mishap, and shot photos galore of everything except archaeology. Then we all sat together on an eastern cliff to compare the bay now with the bay on photos taken more than a century ago of a fish-trap, trying to figure out where it must have been.

Then we motored over and he dropped us two off on the shore to look for fish-trap remnants. The trap was basically a row of pilings extending from shore well into a known salmon run, strung with net to force them into a spot where the fishermen would net them (‘Brailing’ is the term used for the harvest on one of the blurry action photos). Version 1 set out straight from shore, but did not work, at which point the boss man nailed a chair to a piling and watched the fish, then decided that a dogleg back to the south would work, which it did. Purse-seiner boats often waited beyond the end of the trap to scoop up the smart fish. Traps were outlawed generations ago, after people noticed that stocks had been decimated.

So anyway, our survey, still yet benefitting from low tide, turned up nothing by way of fish-trap v1.0 or 1.1. But I did find a couple of semi-circular walls of stone where cobble beach gave way to sand. These are probably old-time clam gardens: low stone walls exposed at low tide and submerged at high, formed of stone cleared from the muck to improve clam habitat and define a family’s harvest area.

Our work done here, the spontaneous consensus was to head to Lummi, eponymous island of the Lummi Tribe, where our agency manages a piece of land. Beautiful arcs betwixt islands, the boat performing a stately hula until throttling down in a small bay, one of the only landings on a cliff-bound coast.

And not far off an odd site. Midden almost entirely of clam at a place where digging for them would be difficult or fruitless. Steep land, the only fresh water a pitiful seep. I think I know why people still came here, but I sure as hell ain’t telling the internet.

Then back to Secret Harbor, sweeping white wakes under a sunny sky. Fish jumping, birds diving, currents ripping.

Now, the common misconception is that a state worker landing at 4 or 5 PM would call it quits. But no, daylight on an island is too precious. Honcho took off in his boat, while us two hydrated at the field station, then readied for a walk to the south shore. She got a tank of elixir sure to slay alien thistle, and I my same old 30-pound pack of archaeo-gear. There we found the homestead of Nedrow, inventor of some sort of saw, as well as an old olivine mine. Homes cut into hillsides and mines more massively cut into hills are easy pickin’s, archaeologically speaking, and the waning afternoon for me was a matter of walking the beach and clicking off GPS points and photos as I found stuff.

The thistle-slayer tank empty, the sites recorded, we headed back. I fashioned chicken chili verde with squash, and we supped. I put off writing this and read Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, which is excellent. Fell asleep and dreamt of falling into a dreamless sleep.