Fort Ebey State Park and Whidbey Island

Viv and I took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather over last weekend, the first full weekend in June, to camp out at Fort Ebey State park. It’s south by about one-third of Whidbey Island from the bridge at spectacular Deception Pass. You can reach Whidbey from Seattle either by road or by ferry. If you choose to stay off the big boats, the route takes you north to Mount Vernon. There, turn west and drive through the Skagit Valley before heading south again through Oak Harbor.

Mount Vernon happened to be holding a farmers’ market by the banks of the river that flows through town. Viv needed a latte, so we took a pit stop. We’d planned to buy bread on the road, and bought an overpriced loaf at the market. It was good bread, mind you, but we paid too much for it.

While I was there I enjoyed some of the signage typography on the town’s buildings.

We got on the road again, following a familiar route that takes us by a fast-food shack that I constantly forget to take a picture of: “The Net, since 1956.” Apparently the Skagit has a good lead on the rest of us in high-speed networking and so forth. I’m always puzzled, though, by the relatively small size of the building and the refreshing lack of Californiesque bragmobiles parked about the facility. Oh well, it’s probably some sort of distributed-office, miniaturization deal.

Once out of the Skagit, you’re in Military Land. Several active military bases are nearby. While rainbow stickers may be seen with frequency, yellow ribbons, American flags, and hand-painted signs in support of the military were everywhere, some a bit the worse for wear after months of hard service.

The drive into Whidbey passes over the twin spans of the Deception Pass bridge. The parkland abutting the bridge is generally reckoned the most beautiful in the Washington State Parks system. The better known parks, like Rainier and Olympic, are National Parks – the state sorta got the leavings, but geez, what leavings!

We were headed to yet another of the land scraps that are ever-more-shakily administered by a perennially underfunded state parks department. Fort Ebey was used as a coastal defense gun battery emplacement during the end of World War II and opened to the public as a state park in 1967. The gun-emplacement mounts and accompanying bunker system is still in place, overlooking Admiralty Inlet and the waters directly north of Port Townsend. Just a few miles down the island is another state park, also a former military post, Fort Casey State Park. It also offers a campground, but it’s not reservable in advance.

I’d picked out our campsite online, believing, based on a map, that it would be just steps from the water’s edge. Neglecting to consider the strategic elements involved in locating an artillery battery, I hadn’t considered that we might be atop a 300-foot cliff, as indeed we were.

Despite this, the views – and weather, topping 90 degrees – were stunning. We strolled along the flat trail at the bluff’s edge, still hoping to find a route to the beach in our flip-flops. Gnarled, ancient pines, obviously Ents deep in woody slumber, provided shady respite as we followed the cliff, helplessly stopping to ooh and aaah at the view.

Finally, consulting the map with growing consternation, we grew puzzled. “Beach,” it said, an arrow pointing off the map. We kept on, finally finding the trail indicated but noting that is was not a well-maintained trail. In flip-flops and shorts, we were not really prepared for a woodsy lumberjack hike.

At last we reached a point where the trail looped by a breach in a sandwall. A family group mugged for their camera, and we asked if they knew of a beach trail. They were quite puzzled, and began to describe local landmarks and things that had washed away years ago, and finally decided that the cut in the cliff they were occupying was the supposed trail.

I went to the notch and looked at a steep series of eroded sand gullies, a slippery decsent of “only” about 200 feet. A subset of the locals encouraged us to go down. “Oh, it’s easy,” they urged. A voice of reason among them also noted the easy-speakers had just returned from the Andes, and thus nearly any trail might appear easy to them. Viv and I turned back, disappointed.

We had passed a closed trail; the main path we were on showed signs of neglect; and throughout the park were signs of other budgetary limitations. The check-in booth was only manned a total of three hours that day, forcing us to take a special trip to get a park map. Information posted along trails appeared to be outdated or inaccurate from time to time. There were limited numbers of trash receptacles and restrooms.

When we got back to the trail to our campsite, we decided to continue down the bluff trail in the opposite direction we’d taken earlier, toward the gun emplacement site. We walked a few yards down the path and saw a magnificent plateau covered with long, waving grasses. On the plateau was a concrete bunker, and above was the gun emplacement. We went into the cool, pitch-black interior of the man-made cave, and exited the other side.

Back at camp, we made dinner and then returned to the plateau’s long grasses to investigate a trench and to watch the sun set into the water. That night I read Vivian book six of the Illiad by the fire.

The next day, we finally found the beach access, to the north of the gun battery, and walked along the beach, noting the myriad dead crabs, presumably cooked in the heat of the day before when their kelp strands had grounded on the beach. On a snag above us, a bald eagle sat a while before taking wing.

The weather was absolutely perfect again, and it was pleasant to be in the cool ocean air as the sun beat down.

We decided to poke around the nearby small town of Coupeville before leaving, which sits on the shore of Penn Cove, home of Washington’s most-eaten mussels, and the shoreside districts of which are a national historical reserve. Founded in the 1850’s, the small, old-fashioned downtown includes an 1853 blockhouse – one of four nearby, all dating to the 1800’s – and a commercial wharf which was in use in the 1880’s.

The tidal flats under the wharf are covered – absolutely covered – with mussels. The gulls walk along the banks of shellfish, pecking and gulping with less than the usual squawking and squalling. In the wharf-building itself there’s a mounted skeleton of a juvenile grey whale, found dead on Whidbey in 1998, and a tourist gewgaw shoppe.

The shops in the historic area near the wharf tend to the antiquey and baubley, as ever in America’s tiny tourist hamlets. We even poked into a store that featured everything for the dog owner that’s got everything, including hats for your dog and tiny dog-angel ornaments to comfort those seeking the solace of knowledge that the afterlife includes beloved pets.

After learning that the plastic bags of water stapled above the open shop door “keep flies out,” I chuckled, noting the buzzing winged creatures just inside the door. Perhaps they were the beloved pet-sprits; plainly they couldn’t be flies. We moved on.

Toby’s was the only beer-serving establishment open that Sunday afternoon, and so we stopped in for a plate of their repeatedly prize-winning fish and chips, which I must endorse as among the best fish and chips I’ve ever eaten. The front window of the place featured unit stickers of countless military outfits, and there were a couple of well-shorn young men impressing some ladies with tales of derring-do in booths nearby as we ate. In fact, as we ate, the place filled up, and competition for booth space became as cutthroat as in your favorite hipster cafe.

One of the truly striking things about Coupeville, in fact, was the relative lack of crowds. To an extent, this was true at Fort Ebey as well, although the campground was full to capacity. Whidbey is just remote enough, and just working-stiff enough, thanks to the military bases, that it’s in the third rank of attractions among driving distance to Seattle, after the big mountain parks and the San Juans themselves.

Third place in Puget Sound, especially in the summer, is still pretty damn good. The thinner crowds on Whidbey are without a doubt a perfectly good reason to return; anyone who’s ever been stuck in the perpetual, summer-long traffic jam high atop Mount Rainier at the unhappily named Paradise parking lot will have good reason to appreciate an unhurried, crowd-free weekend on Whidbey Island.

(Here are all the photos from the weekend. Anita Rowland has also written about a visit to Coupeville.)

Sometime in 1980, I think, my dad spent a great deal of time determining that he wanted to follow his individualist streak and obtain a Kaypro II, a 64k dual-floppy machine that used the pre-DOS operating system CP/M and whose most important feature was the tank-like, large-suitcase-style construction. The keyboard was housed in the lid of the box, and the drives were stacked next to the 9-inch green phosphor screen.

(While I’m certain that the computer was in our house by 1980, documentation indicates that Kaypro IIs were released in 1982, so it’s likely that the computer was something else – maybe a DEC-10 dumb terminal with the coupler described below. I supose this would mean my interest in online communities preceded my interest in some computer games, but others would have been avaliable, such as Adventure.)

I was disappointed that he’d not decided to pursue the Apple route at the time, as I’d seen my good friend Eric’s father’s lab computer, an Apple II, and hoped that Eric and I would be able to learn together, swap software, and so forth. Alas, it was not to be.

My father, an academic, had long used computers in his research for publication, but the machines available to him for these operations were punch-card-programmed and consequently quite limited in terms of access, active storage space, and convenience. I don’t know what the final selling point for Dad was, but 1980 would have been about the time the first productivity applications came on the market – WordStar, VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, and so forth. I believe the hot home-office database program at the time was dBase II.

I was only mildly interested in that aspect of the machine. It was the games that I was interested in. Eric’s apple had an amazing graphic game called “Choplifter” on it (seen here in a C64 color version which is actually less clean in appearance than I recall the vector-graphics based one on the Apple). I had seen other dazzlingly promising displays on an academic network called PLATO (check out that link! A historical marker!) that linked the Indiana University and University of Illinois main campuses. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that the Kaypro had no graphics capabilities whatsoever.

At best, programmers could animate ASCII characters to create games that were functional emulations of the video games of the day, at least some of them, such as Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. Despite the underwhelming graphics these games were playable.

However, clearly it was in the manipulation and presentation of text that the Kaypro would perform best. I still have saved games of ADVENT, the cp/m Adventure port, that are playable on my current Mac G4, courtesy a rock-solid cp/m emulator available freely at emulation.net. “You are in a twisty maze of passageways, all alike.”

When the maze held no more mystery, I began to pester my father for a system user ID to the campus computing network, known at that time as Wrubel. That was short for the name of the central campus IT facility, Wrubel Computing Center, a dingy little set of rooms tucked around the back of the large physical education facility known as the HPER, or ‘hyper’. Today, WCC occupies my old middle school. Jon Konrath has an online history of the growth and changes that occurred shortly circa 1990 which led to the center’s relocation.

My dad was able to access Wrubel via an amazing device, apparently designed by Goths and sent backward in time to the seventies, called an acoustic coupler.

It’s a modem, but rather than simply plugging the cord from the phone into a little jack, you have to take an old-fashioned, round-ended telephone handset and jam the ends into the heavy-duty round rubber cuffs that grip the speaker and mike with what can only be described as sexual intensity. Then you dial the connection number, wait for the familiar hiss and burble, and flip the switch on the coupler, telling it to translate the white noise into 1s and 0s. (Image courtesy of the University of Virginia online Computer Museum)

I believe the device may have reached the startling transfer speed of 300 baud. On a good day. I’m sure you can imagine the inherent inefficiencies. (The info page linked above describes the speed as 10 characters per second.)

At any rate, Dad never did spring for an ID, and I ended up “obtaining” an unused, forgotten account that I continued to employ until sometime around my graduation from high school in 1984. And what on Earth was I doing, poking around the guts of the WCC?

Why, participating in an early incarnation of a bulletin board, of course. It was called Note; it was completely unauthorized; and occasionally it would eat up enough system resources to attract the attention of a dutiful high priest (we called them ‘truck drivers,’ natch) and be deleted.

At any rate, my experience is similar to others’ initial experiences of BBS-based communities. It was my first brush with written communication as a vehicle for self-expression and argument in a meaningful context. A great deal of eccentric amusement. Silly names. Fascinating, detailed arguments about the overarching issues of the day, the millenia, and Star Trek. It was the best, and it wholly validated parts of my personality that had never experienced positive feedback, largely by putting me into social contact with other linguistically-gifted persons.

Then in 1981, we moved away for a year; when I returned, girls, punk rock, and the assorted attractions of full-blossomed adolescence drew me away from the Note community, as it was called. Since it was a social network largely inhabited by current college students with an interest in computers and this was the very early 1980’s, there was a great deal of admiration for the music of Rush, and very little for that of the Sex Pistols.

I continued to use the computer, until I graduated from college, in fact; all of my term papers were written on it. But I never forgot the online experience, and when in the early 1990’s, the first tendrils of Internet culture began to tenderly caress my lobes (I believe I the form of the FutureCulture email list), I immediately began a crash course to obtain a more recent-vintage computer and modem. That was in 1992, I think.

(This was written as a contribution to Adam Kalsey’s Newly Digital distributed memoir project.)

As I made my way home from talking with local filmmaker Jamie Hook, I grabbed a bite at the Kidd Valley near my house.

Just as I turned from the counter, another patron said something that ended with the words “…fallen.” I turned to look out the door where a concerned elderly woman hovered over another elderly person, lying on the sidewalk outside the restaurant.

The attention of the restaurant shifted onto the old couple as I made my way to a seat. Employees provided a telephone and a call was placed, presumably to 911.

From my seat I could see the various denizens of the tiny park across the street from the restaurant also watching the couple. A trio of street drunks appeared to be the only persons who remained oblivious of the event.

The drunks on the bench tenderly released their bottle from the depths of their coats before passing it with reverence to the next most grabby of their number. After his slug, that lucky man exaggeratedly concealed the bottle somewhere in the folds of his clothing.

Eventually the attention of the restaurant and of the others in the park returned to what they had been doing – eating, reading, waiting for the bus – with the clear exceptions of the older members of both populations.

At the bus stop, a seventyish man with a sagging face and intricate folds of skin beneath his jaw gravely regarded the couple from under the brim of his grey fedora, hands folded behind his back. His jaw worked erratically. Open, shut open, open, shut, open. At first it appeared that he was talking to himself.

A somewhat younger man, seated at a window booth in the restaurant, regarded the scene from under a rakish snap-brim, enlivened by a spray of pheasant feathers. His hat and recently barbered grey hair were at odds with his puffy orange coat. In the booth behind him, a white-haired, grandmotherly type gazed at the scene on the sidewalk.

From where I sat, I could not see the couple.

The ambulance arrived, and as the EMTs unlimbered the gurney, the restaurant’s golden oldies soundtrack segued from The Monkees’ Pleasant Valley Sunday into the Rolling Stones’ Time is on my Side.

This weekend we had a pleasant visit from my high-school chum John Strohm, currently deep in law school at a small Alabama college. He and I visited the Experience Music Project, and I must say the museum is improved as a result of visiting in the company of one other person with a deep, life-long interest in American popular music. I’ve been a couple times in the past, and I just kind of find myself lecturing people, instead of swapping stories or exclaiming over the original mechanicals for the first Husker Du album, as happened on this visit.

John also told me that both Jake and Dale, of Hoosier label No Nostalgia, will be presenting papers at a conference at the EMP, April 10-13, according to the website. Hope I get a chance to catch up with them whilst they are here.

After the EMP we strolled through Pike Place, as we’re statutorily obligated to when friends, family, and acquaintances visit us here in the Damp City, and picked up some Columbia River salmon and a bag of clams (or “rocks,” as our fishmonger called them). We then ate hearty and chatted deep into the night.

I’ve always enjoyed John’s intellect, and appreciate that we’re able to track each other through our lives. We jawed up a storm on intellectual property issues, the copyright wars ongoing, and the like – it’s very interesting to discuss this stuff with a seasoned touring and recording musician.

His touring and recording background gives him a familiarity with basic practices and assumptions of the music industry as my experience in technology does for computing, development, and software, so a certain component of the conversation consists of comparing notes. It’s a very interesting time to look at law, I have to admit, and John’s certainly encouraged me to consider it as a possible school route.

We had a good time swapping gossip about pals. One person that came up was Paul Mahern, recording engineer on John Mellencamp’s last record, possibly on the new one that comes out shortly, and the leader of 80’s proto-hardcore rockers the Zero Boys. Out of curiosity, I took a look at the Coug’s website and what the heck?

Mellencamp.com is hosting an anti-war song, “To Washington,” based on a really old folk song, the White House Blues (it’s the song on the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music that opens with “McKinley’s in the White House a-doin’ his best” and refrains on the line “From Baltimore to Washington”). Apparently Mellencamp recorded the song over the past year as a part of the sessions for his upcoming all-folk and traditional record, Trouble No More, due out in May.

WHAT?

Now, let me be totally clear: my favorite Bob Dylan record of all time is a spare recording he made of traditionals called Good As I Been To You, so I have no beef with Mellencamp looking in that direction. In fact, I kind of expect that it’ll be pretty good – his style of music has always had a strong traditional element.

Mellencamp’s career started in Bloomington, and after he broke around 1980, he chose to keep working from his home near Seymour, very close to my hometown. His music, while aesthetically preferable to much of what was on the radio in the 1980’s , was adopted as a sort of standard by the tobacco-chewing segment of my high school populace, some of whom quite literally could not restrain themselves from beating the crap out of me every time they saw me (one troubled young man was actually banned from the school’s property, under threat of arrest and charges, yet his desire to beat the shit out of me – to kill me – was so great that he did indeed return to pound my ass into the dirt).

So, you know, it’s a bit unsettling to hunker down behind my barricades of piled up seventy-eights, muttering imprecations, and glancing to my side see the songwriter whose little ditties were adopted by my fisticuff-oriented classmates lofting his “No Iraq War” sign. Mind you, I’m glad to see him.

I haven’t listened to it yet, but will do so tomorrow – I can say that the original tune he borrows from is among the catchiest of the songs on the Anthology. And I still don’t know if Mahern worked on it or not.

I hope to turn in a longer entry, but a picture is worth a thousand words, correct?

We spent Saturday night at a beachfront cabin on the Oregon Coast in a small town called Netarts (nee-tarts). The cabin was an outrageous bargain – directly on the beach, with a complete kitchen (dishwasher, microwave, etcetera), and feturing miscellaneous amazing antiques, including what appeared to be a completely original turn-of-the-century floor lamp, a freestanding cabinet Victrola that included a selection of 78s (but sadly, did not play becasue the tone arm was stiff), and a basket full of stereopticon views, with stereopticon (among the views were several selections from the time of the United States’ 1898 invasion of Cuba, including views of American volunteers, President McKinley’s cabinet, soldiers writing home, a battleship in harbor, a sentimental series depicting the veteran’s return, and finally, the gravesite of the assassinated McKinley).

And topping it off, a fireplace. Damn!

However much the cabin amazed me – it felt as though we were staying in a friend’s house – the spectacular beach walks wowed me more. We’ll be returning, without a doubt.

Here’s the full galleries: March 22 | March 23

And a few selections:

	Viv in the distance. This is just about high tide and it’s around 5:30 pm.
	A Suntory whiskey bottle. One of quite a few Japanese bottles that had apparently crossed the ocean. We, in fact, found not one, but two blown-glass fishing floats.
	Clouds reflected in the wet tidal flats. The flats extend way, way out from the bluffs and are quite hard-packed. This picture was taken at around 11 am, near low tide.
	One of many factory-trawler (I assume – it’s obviously for a big net) net fishing floats we saw. This one, and then all of them, became “Wilson.”
	I’m holding a group of mussels, each one at least six inches long. It’s heavy. We did not eat them. I believe the beach is a state park.
	The start of a long walk. The three off-shore rocks on the horizon are about two miles away, and we walked beyond them, to the beach front of the next little town to the north, Oceanside. We ate lunch there and then walked back, on the hard-packed sand of the beach the whole way.

In the future, have at least one meal prior to drinking several pitchers of beer with Spencer.

Orange alert? head for Poulsbo, WA!

Regular blogging will resume sometime Sunday.

BABBlers, post pix! I insist!

In celebration of Viv’s birthday (her 29th, of course) we’ll be having a nice dinner before seeing the Triumph of Love in preview at the Seattle Rep this evening.

Ta-ta!

(Should I wear my bowler, fer the luvvagod? Too eccentric, huh.)

So there I was this afternoon, digging around in a completely-dwindled pile of plastic grocery bags back in the kitchen closet. The pile amounted to two bags, so maybe it was not a pile any longer.

I was fixing to scoop the poop from our exceedingly fecund cats’ necessary box, as clearly instructed to by my lovely wife via the damned telephone. I must learn to be quicker in ending my calls.

The first bag, naturally, had a hole in it, so I placed it in the trash.

The second bag was… Well, it was too good for the use its’ predecessors had been chosen for. I think I’ll stick it in a drawer someplace and haul it out to show my niece and nephew when they hit late puberty and are seeking proof that they really do have it harder than anyone else ever did.

“Yep,” I’ll mumble through gummy chops, spittle coursing through my stubble. “See this bag?”