The first day after an 8-hour time jump feels a lot like being on another planet. You wander about in a fugue state, answering the questions of bartenders and cashiers with a dumbfounded stare. Words once common to your vocabulary are suddenly nowhere to be found: “That thing, you know, the thing that you… put […]
Posts in category Misadventures
Mounds Beyond Mounds
Explanations for unexplained geological phenomena range from the plausible (glacial deposition, earthquakes, erosion), to the adorable (pocket gophers), to the ridiculous (aliens). While part of what makes a place like Mima Mounds so fascinating is this mystery, it is a strange experience to walk through a landscape that the modern mind cannot explain. Foxgloves rise […]
River Ice
From their headwaters in Western Pennsylvania and Upstate New York, the two main branches of the Susquehanna River wind toward Northumberland. There they meet and continue as one, rolling south to the Chesapeake Bay. Two days after Christmas, I sit on a bench swing between two trees, watching ice floes float down the Susquehanna. Steam […]
Go Cougs
A wooden fencepost, its yellow paint faded with time, points from Wilridge Vineyard down the winery trail into Cowiche Canyon. On this snow-hushed morning, our boots make the only sound, crunching in the snow as we descend through the shrub steppe toward the creek that cut this canyon from the landscape long ago. Clumps of […]
Playing Adam
In 1792, naval officer George Vancouver was exploring Puget Sound, naming things after his pals on behalf of the British Empire. Of course, these things already had names (and names that sounded a lot cooler than “Puget,” “Gardner,” and “Whidbey”), but they were hard to pronounce, and asking the natives what they called the local […]
Battery
Six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States military began construction of Fort Ebey at the westernmost point of Whidbey Island. Overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the fort was to stand as the first line of defense for Puget Sound, home to shipyards and Boeing plants crucial for the war […]
Intertidal
At the westernmost tip of West Seattle, Alki Beach looks out over Puget Sound toward Bainbridge Island and the Olympic Mountains. A freighter moves slowly, silently, up the channel. Two harbor seals float offshore, their heads bobbing above the soft waves of a late summer day. Despite its proximity to the pollution and industry of […]
Laughing Water
Minnehaha Creek begins at the eastern edge of Lake Minnetonka and flows east about twenty-one miles, spills over the limestone lip of a cliff as Minnehaha Falls, then travels one last mile to feed the Mississippi River. Contrary to popular belief, Minnehaha does not actually mean “laughing water,” though as I stand at the foot of […]